THE FILM VERDICT: We’re in a time of wars raging on several fronts, and rising xenophobia worldwide. Some might say the stakes are high, in terms of what a documentary festival can do to highlight issues. What is your mood going into this edition, and your expectations for the programme in light of these dark days?
ORWA NYRABIA: To me it is essential that a festival is a platform for people to meet. It is not just about watching films. Watching films has a great role in our experience of the world, but I despise it when people talk about the educational role of documentary film, as it is about so much more than finding out how something works and what happened. It is about connecting together, of finding these moments of breaking out from our own daily bubbles and really getting to know that not all Asians look the same, that not all Arabs have the same opinion, and not all Americans eat too much. That to me is at the core of what a film festival does. It is an intensive break out, and I hope we can provide a moderated space for different films from different viewpoints that really approach or carry us to different conflicts around the world, including what’s happening in Gaza today, in rich ways but in an atmosphere that is simply safe, with debates that enrich our views of the people involved in these conflicts. At IDFA we will have many conflicts represented and everything is getting very hot. When we programmed this festival it was all before October 7, and there is a kind of serendipity or kismet in the fact that we are in the eye of the storm with the programme we have done. I had interest in the political facet of what we were doing, but it was not that that drove the choices. Today I’m afraid that the political reality will colour the entire programme, and I hope that we manage to not make the world’s political disasters be painted in colours too solid; that it at least remains an interesting, nuanced, complex image of the world.
FV: In terms of bringing people together, with the global mood and conversations so tense and fraught right now, how do you navigate the different positions? Do you think it’s incumbent on the festival to take political stances, or is that not its role?
ON: I think it is absolutely a festival’s role to take political stances, but my political stance here is not one of saying I am pro this, or against that. My political stance is to try and to appreciate all the humans trying to break out of this cycle of violence, and to try to give a platform to all of them. It is about ceasing fire now, but it is not about fighting over who started it, and trying to pick which month of which year is the beginning of what, and there is something about being truly progressive that is about looking forward, towards the future. In that sense, I do have a lot of respect for the pain of so many people on different sides of different conflicts, and I am not willing to abandon that. I’m not here to have empathy towards one pain and not the other. I think this is the privilege of being in a safe country. I think when we are in safe countries instead of just joining the fight, and transferring conflicts, we can have the privilege of being able to moderate.
FV: A lot of people are saying right now they are saturated with the news, and this eternal cycle of social media, that they feel a need to switch off. Do you think that documentary as a format can do things that the news media cannot, in terms of re-engaging people when they are feeling fatigued or disoriented?
ON: I don’t think that the moment of extreme pain is the right moment for everybody to contemplate. I think people also have the right to feel they don’t want to contemplate this now, if they are too angry, or too tired. IDFA is one of those festivals that have a very wide spectrum of films, and in the offer there are also films that might feel to some like full escapism from reality but might actually be the right films for somebody else to be watching today. I think we should all keep our own agency over what we need to be thinking about now. What you will not get from our programme is facile answers, so if what is needed is somebody to tell you that you are right I think and I hope that that is not very easy to find here, because most of the films we are selecting do offer highly subjective angles that are complex. When I programmed, for example, a conversation on stage between Sky Hopinka, the Native American artist and filmmaker, and Basma al-Sharif, the renowned Palestinian video artist, I thought that would be a discussion at a moment everybody would be capable of contemplating difficult questions. I did not know that it would be in a moment of extremes. This is not for everyone at every moment, but that’s why we keep on coming back, and returning to questions.
FV: The focus programme Fabrications explores documentary as constructed. Today with AI and all this proliferating disinformation, do you get worried that the image is losing its power as evidence or some kind of bearer of truth, and that we are getting into some kind of place where people are just not able to believe what they see anymore?
ON: I think so, but I think this is great. I think there is a massive philosophical reduction in the way we treat image as the truth, and to me, it is actually a very promising new beginning, when we actually start to realise that sometimes a fully fabricated image is so much more truthful than an image that is done with somebody’s mobile in the street. In a way the narrative around an image and its surroundings are what makes film, and truth is in the eye of the beholder. It’s something that we should stop simplifying, by thinking that BBC objectivity is the reference. We’ve seen how easy it is today, starting with the Arab Spring and citizen street journalism, and continuing in Ukraine and every conflict today, that real images taken by citizens in the streets are doubted, labelled fake news and then lost, while fake news is labelled as truth. In my opinion, actually it has always been like this, but we did not notice, and with AI and the globalisation of media as we experience it today, we now see that image is not just the truth, that it is the truth plus plus, and these many pluses after the truth are also a matter of choice.
FV: Can you comment on your choice of Peter Greenaway for a retrospective, whose visually extravagant films are often thought about more in terms of fiction?
ON: The unclassifiable Greenaway is a cinematic thinker whose view of cinema is my proposal. What he has been trying to do for a few decades already might be, at least in my opinion, much more timely today even than when he first did it. I have this crazy idea of what a festival is. It translates in different ways, but I think of a festival as the ground zero for a contagion. It is not about whether Greenaway is documentary or fiction, or whether he is right or wrong, but that he does spread a particular virus of questioning what we are doing, and I think that’s fascinating and inspiring. Today, in an overtly commercialised, post-pandemic film world, it’s quite interesting to go back and listen to the guy who first tried to make an interactive film. In a world that relies heavily on using the word storytelling as a basis for defending why film matters and should be funded, it’s very interesting to listen to the guy who always thought that storytelling will kill cinema. To me, it is about the complexity that he offers, and about this contagion of being skeptical. He is the best agnostic I know when it comes to what cinema is, and he certainly is not a fiction director, nor a documentary director. He certainly does not see cinema in this binary.
FV: This idea of breaking down classifications is very interesting, and obviously we have seen a rise in the popularity of hybrid documentaries. This year, your IDFA on Stage section links with new media and performance art. Do you feel the traditional, conventional form of documentary is becoming not fit for the times?
To me, the opportunity that a platform like IDFA can offer is this multiplicity, and pluralism of possibilities. Now, which one will die, and which one will grow, I don’t know, I just know that they are valid proposals, and that we will enjoy thinking about these questions that you raised, and asking whether this will be the future. Maybe you attend one performance in IDFA On Stage and feel like that should be the future, and maybe you watch another one and think it will be very niche. So, in a way, it is an experimentation space. IDFA On Stage is very precious to me, because this was one of my first changes in the programme. IDFA used to do brilliant music and documentary events, where you would have a film with music in it and then musicians after, and as much as I enjoyed that I also found it very limited or limiting, and that it could be more open. I have no certainty about anything, and to me this is what fuels that kind of multifaceted programming. I love documentary film for many reasons, but I am not a fanatic. The easiest definition I have of what documentary is, would be an artistic processing of reality. That’s it, and then it can be endless.
