After seven sometimes stormy years as artistic director of IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Orwa Nyrabia recently shared the surprise news that he is leaving the post when his contract expires next year. Here the Syrian-born film-maker, human rights campaigner and former political prisoner tells The Film Verdict about the festival’s current program, his reasons for stepping down, and documentary cinema’s duty to remain a safe space for critical thinking and radical empathy, even under extreme political and commercial pressure.
The Film Verdict: This is your final year directing IDFA. Are you feeling relieved or bereaved?
“Neither. It’s not that I feel relieved, I just feel confident this is the right moment, this is the right thing to do now. It’s been a great journey, and I am a sucker for a good end. But to be serious, this is also about finding the right time for transition, for the organisation and myself. And this is not a short-term thing, seven and a half years not short. We need to find a moment where this is positive, and where we can appreciate the good we have done, no matter how self-critical I am. Because I think our field altogether is in very vulnerable times. Film and documentary and customers, everything is really in a fragile moment. This makes one think of this responsibility. If you’re transitioning, let that not come in a moment where that will cause harm or difficulty.”
You and the festival drew intense criticism over pro-Palestine protests that disrupted last year’s IDFA opening, just weeks after the October 7 attacks on Israel. Obviously the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are ongoing and highly contentious. Did this controversy play any part in your decision to step down?
“No… but in a way, of course it did, because I’m not only an artistic guy, I’m also a human. I am faced with very difficult discussions about the distance between pragmatism and solidarity. For example, the realities of a film industry that is entirely ruled by neo-liberal economics and a very neo-liberal understanding of politics and ethics. To me, that’s very difficult, because it is always this tap-dancing or walking on a tightrope between losing your respect of not only of yourself, but also of documentary film altogether, and losing the livelihood or the sustainability of the sector. In a way, it really is a razor edge that was in the making for years. These big questions did not come from the current massacres in Gaza and Lebanon and so on, they came gradually through the big questions of this era, from racial reckoning to decolonisation, questions like this. Then suddenly the atrocities of Gaza made this into an accelerator. So the questions could not be postponed any more.”
Just to be clear, you are not saying you have been directly forced out by political pressure?
“Absolutely not. I’m still there for this edition, and for six months after that. We faced these difficult questions. We went through these discussions and dialogues, and we did a lot of good work, I think, on the topic. We organised an international symposium on the topic in August. It was very important and informative, but it had to be done without any presence of the press, without any public aspect. Because I’m trying to say it out loud today: the levels of self-censorship, direct and indirect, in our sector globally this year has been unprecedented. I think this is a reality. We had to do a symposium on the topic without any visible public aspects because many colleagues from around the world came and we needed to be able to talk openly and freely. It’s so scary that in this world of film, that used to be really always at the avant-garde of this link between society, politics, and art, usually film is here at the forefront. In the past year, I think we were beaten up by this extreme pragmatism of what I must call out as a neo-liberal mentality.”
What are some of your your personal highlights from this year’s IDFA program?
“Yes, indeed. I don’t prefer to single out films in competitions, but the festival is much bigger than the competition. To me, I am really excited about the way that our guest of honour Johan Grimonprez is approaching his curated program. We will screen his latest film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat on Sunday, and then I will have a long masterclass conversation with him. But also the way he curated his film choices, it became more like six bags of films and clips, and each one he will accompany personally with his laptop, not only with the full film screenings, but also with onstage talks that he does brilliantly to carry us through the journey of his films. So he will be not just showing us films that impacted him, he will be taking us through this journey with his own voice, with his own selected clips from different audiovisual works over the years.”
IDFA has always been a strong platform for hybrid film-makers who blend fact and fiction. This year you will host a heavyweight guest in this field, Romanian provocateur Radu Jude.
“Radu Jude is one of my generation’s most prominent art-house film-makers. He has a lot to say to the world and to film. Even when he makes a fiction film, the way he works is similar to the way a documentary film-maker works. For example, his last big achievement in fiction, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, during casting he found out that his main actress had this avatar that she did during the pandemic, so then he decided to cast and her avatar. Even in his fiction work, this cinematic approach is to keep his script open throughout the process, which is usually what documentary film-makers do well, not fiction. He made a number of short documentary films before, but this year he made two, and they’re long. So there’s reason to celebrate this and to have a discussion.”
There is also a retrospective spotlight on Cuban documentary cinema, including the underrated Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez.
“I am very happy we are both doing a retrospective of the great Sara Gómez but also celebrating the uniqueness of the film school in San Antonio de los Baños, called ECTV. This is the school founded by Fernando Birri and Gabriel García Márquez in the ’80s. In a way, it is a unique oasis of artistic freedom in the middle of an island that is not an oasis of freedom. And we look at Sara Gómez’s history, one of the most beautiful stories of documentary cinema. This young woman died at 31, but remains an inspiration because she was this revolutionary film-maker who started her career by coincidence, because Agnès Varda was making her documentary in Cuba, and she was hired to be her assistant. Then she started making documentary films that were always starting from a place of celebrating the propaganda-style triumph of the revolution, and then deconstructing this until you see the massive paradox between the façade and the real experience of people in daily life. It’s fascinating how she was this revolutionary who was banned by the revolution again and again. She was basically omitted from history, but she’s now being rediscovered. So these are some of the highlights.”
You were jailed by the Assad regime in your native Syria in 2012. Did this give you a heightened empathy towards other oppressed, censored and incarcerated film-makers?
“Of course it did! It affected everything about me. That was a very miserable experience, and also a great experience of privilege because I was defended by the entire film world, and that was what saved my life. That’s why I co-founded, with other colleagues, the International Coalition for Film-makers at Risk, so that we can advocate for film-makers who are being prosecuted or whose safety is jeopardised anywhere. Now, for example, we have this Uyghur film-maker in China, Ikram Nurmehmet, who is detained. But to me, it goes beyond that and began before it. I grew up late ’90s, early 2000s, in a film world that was, as I said in the beginning, the film-makers were the avant-garde. In Syria, in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Palestine, in the US, in France, whenever there was an injustice, you would see those amazing long lists of film-makers signing together statements and raising their voice in solidarity. Then, gradually, I do not see that work any more.”
In politically volatile times, do outspoken film-makers risk being too political?
“Sorry, I don’t think there’s such a thing. I think we’re all very political. Who’s not political? I mean, look at anybody, from Martin Scorsese to Yorgos Lanthimos. Or if you go in fiction, in documentary, who is not political? The only thing that is not political, but even this is political in a way, is the massive glut of true crime and celebrity documentaries. This is de-depoliticisation of the documentary art. This is neo-liberal politics, to empty such a great art from its actual added value to the world.”
So making an apolitical film is actually a political statement?
“Absolutely. All of this is at the core of what documentary film stands for throughout its history. This is not something that Orwa Nyraiba or anybody can come now and discard. The history of documentary film-making has always been about pointing things like this out and about being, as I said repeatedly this past few weeks, being always uncomfortable, causing discomfort through serious artistic treatment of these difficult questions.”
As you prepare to leave IDFA, how would you sum up your legacy?
“I don’t know, I honestly don’t. Because it’s a massive amount of work that is really multilayered. What would be there, I would say, is balancing out the weight of the mainstream market, not by antagonising it but by allowing space for the independent, the under-financed and the under-represented. This applies both to geography, the West versus the rest of the world, and also to gender, to men and women and non-binary gender. And this also applies to artistic sensitivities. It is not only about films that will work in an American market for a big audience. No, these films are here in IDFA and they’re welcome, and actually also sometimes maturing brilliantly as a genre. But there are also many other genres that have their true meaning, and they are of no less importance. If there’s something I hope would leave some impression in this field of festivals or documentary or whatever, it is this continuous game between radicalism and pragmatism, where we are not cutting off all the bridges with a privileged mainstream market, but we are also able to put everybody else on the same stage.”
So a happy ending, on some level at least?
“I think we redefined a bit our place, which is not that we have answers, just that we are more confident in what we stand for. In a way, I look now and I see truly very good programs, both in the film side, in the new media side, and also in the markets with projects in the making. This made me feel like, yeah, this arc is ending. Other arcs are starting, but this is the right time for change. You can’t change when you are in the middle of a crisis. I think this is the happy place.”
*IDFA is currently running in Amsterdam, November 14-24, full program here: https://festival.idfa.nl/
