And so the 2021 IDFA (originally Nov. 17-28) ended abruptly when the government of the Netherlands, announcing new Covid-19 measures, effectively cancelled the last day of the festival. Mercifully, it was a Sunday and the award ceremony had been held a few days before, a nifty IDFA move that showed good timing. Not that there was much to begrudge for an event lucky even to have an opening day and then several days afterwards. IDFA admin and many festivalgoers must have suffered some inconvenience, given the inevitability of cancelled tickets, but the dominant mood after the announcement seemed to be gratitude. A major fixture of Amsterdam’s culture calendar had survived a tricky year.
Out on the streets, there seemed to be an equal amount of apprehension and abandon. Inside the hallways and darkened halls of the venues, the same uneasy mix was palpable. You needed a “vaccination approved” wristband to access the festival venues. But once inside, a fair bit of recklessness reigned: coughs from unmasked mouths, non-policed, all-too-cozy seating arrangements, and a partial dearth of hand sanitizers. And yet, everything seemed to have worked out, going by the festival’s own pronouncement of no infections on its grounds. Three cheers for caution and fortuitousness. The city loves its festival and despite the times, there were many sold-out screenings, even for relatively unknown filmmakers. Perhaps a need to connect to life again, given its shortage in the physical environment, propelled people to see real life projected on a screen. Or maybe seeing documentaries is one way the people of Amsterdam meet tragedy.
So, what did they see?
They saw a mixed bag in the main competition. Whereas Cannes and Venice use their main competition to showcase the best that’s currently available—and the occasional familiar face with a less stellar work—the competition films in Amsterdam seemed mostly made by inexperienced filmmakers. That is, except for the winner of the top prize, Sergei Loznitsa’s Mr Landsbergis, a portrait of a Lithuanian politician that clocks in at over four hours. It seems like an odd strategy to place the work of maladroit newcomers, often running around an hour, together in a competition with a monumental 246-minute work from one of the documentary form’s undisputed masters.
It made Mr Landsberghis tower over all the other films even more and reduced the work of the other filmmakers (many of which had perhaps an interesting starting point but then lacked rigor in terms of vision and/or execution) to an amateur level by comparison. The question of theatrical chances for these works is another one that this odd jumble of films immediately suggests, because films that are barely an hour long are as hard to sell to a theatrical distributor as films that are more than four hours long. Is this a kind of unwitting admission that most documentaries will bypass theatrical releases and end up on streaming services, where running time doesn’t matter?
Overall, the IDFA audience saw films about here, about there, about now, about then. IDFA, perhaps, has a more pressing reason to connect in some way with what is going on in the world than the fiction-focused Big 3: Cannes, Venice, Berlin. Closely following the news, IDFA addressed immigration, race, national unrest and, by presenting films from over 80 countries, showed itself as an impressive bastion of inclusion. It was notable that along with the usual images of black poverty and violence, there was Shabu, a joyful portrait of a boisterous black kid living in the Netherlands. It was named Best Youth Documentary, which hopefully will boost its chances of reaching people who have been inundated with all-too-common images of black impoverishment.
IDFA’s interest in the conventional politics of inclusion notwithstanding, this edition had a somewhat artistically inclusive mindset. In fact, an entire section, the Envision competition, focused on experimentation. But as happens with experiments, some were successful, others not so much. The documentary O, Collecting Eggs Despite the Times, by Pim Zwier, featured scenes showing eggs of various kinds as collected by a preternaturally focused oologist, while letters to and from him provide perspective and context, chiefly the Second World War.
On paper, it is hard to believe a film such as this would generate anything more than vague interest followed by rejection, even from documentary audiences. But on the screen, it moved, managing to create a subtly engrossing portrait of an exceedingly minor activity. By selecting it to play at IDFA—and, later, by awarding it—the festival proved it can find the sweet spot between a filmmaker’s eccentric vison and a satisfactory challenge for its audience. Zwier’s project reflected a way to think of IDFA itself, for good or bad, in these Covid-19-afflicted times. While the virus rages (as the war did in those days), here we are at IDFA, ensconced in the dark of the Tuschinski and other venues, coolly and eagerly collecting moving images.
