In the end, it was Apolonia, Apolonia. Lea Glob’s sprawling account of the life and times of the titular actress had received early acclaim and it ended its run on a high, winning the main IDFA award for best film in the international competition. The festival itself was just as uniformly great.
At last year’s event, a layer of constraint had been added to the proceedings. You needed bands to enter venues, and those bands needed proof of vaccination to be received. All of that disappeared at the 35th edition and the city literally poured into the venues. Sold out shows, some for first and second viewings of the same film, were common on the IDFA website, which this year seemed to work much better than it did last time out. At the awards ceremony, festival director Orwa Nyrabia, boisterous with a joy that seemed to spread from his lower limbs through his formidable torso to his smiling visage, announced that attendance had neared what it used to be, in the golden age of documentaries also known as “Before COVID”.
Perhaps this success was about vaccines vanquishing COVID-19 — or maybe it came to a vast, fantastic selection of films. Across the hundreds of films and dozens of countries represented, it seemed nothing was left untouched by the festival’s programmers. The aforementioned Apolonia, Apolonia was one piece of evidence of the ruddy health of documentaries, but several other films could have staked that claim just as easily.
From the UK came Much Ado About Dying, which the jury anointed as the best directed film, its director Simon Chambers clearly chuffed at winning on stage that Thursday night. Chambers’ film started out, he said, not as a film but as a way to stop his self-proclaimed dying uncle and himself from being mean to one another. It became a film and what a glorious one, as mortality, sexuality, and loneliness are contemplated via Uncle David’s immensely watchable actions and Chambers’ oft poetic musings.
Like Apolonia, a major part of the film’s brilliance stems from the subject’s radiance onscreen. A different type of appeal was visible with Merkel, Eva Weber’s documentary on the former German chancellor. Her film was connected to the headlines, even if it eventually showed more leniency than some Germans are willing to grant Mutti Merkel.
IDFA seemed to understand that a huge part of non-fiction’s work is showing reality, telling us about the way we live now, however far-flung the places. Paradise, a film with images so beautiful they could be in the Louvre, followed a group in northeast Siberia. The Oil Machine explains how oil lies at the foundation of many things we now believe are impossible to live without, but also shows us how we may go about de-oiling ourselves. The festival’s brilliance, year after year, lies in how well it informs its audience of their reality and the reality of those who are not quite like them.
But perhaps the hottest topic proposed to festivalgoers was masculinity and its received ideas of display. An entire section was dedicated to it, and even the films that were not exactly on topic seemed to have something to say about it. Oil, for instance, is linked to the exertions of men in The Oil Machine. Apolonia has a passage where a man’s money, which one might take as an extension of his masculinity, puts the female artist in a bit of a funk until she flees and, in one amusing but serious action, literally puts her female body on the line to escape the gilded cage of money.
Those were reflections of masculinity that were useful, even if interpretatively each viewer will take home their own versions. Other kinds were also on display, depending on which screening you walked into. The festival’s most shocking fare put one of masculinity’s main features, violence, in your face. Using clips obtained online, Manifesto by Angie Vinchito tells a story of young people’s encounters with violence, and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee disturbances in their future. That these violent acts are real and actually took place in Russia tells a story that, one imagines, the festival wanted to connect to the Ukraine war. The film ends on a devastating note that puts the concept of a future, at least for the last group on camera, at peril. In a presentation that wasn’t as dark but with the corrosive impact of violence and masculinity still palpable, the festival chose a double bill, starting with Albert and David Maysles’ Meet Marlon Brando, 1966 footage of Marlon Brando talking at a press conference, and ending with director Elisabeth Subrin’s film Maria Schneider, 1983, a re-enactment of a popular interview given by the late actress. Cinema lovers will understand that the connection between them is Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris.
Nyrabia, speaking to Subrin, pressed the issue further. Was Brando playing a game with the female reporter in a manner different from the one he was playing with male reporters? It seems impossible to tell, but Nyrabia was quite certain that the Maysles Brothers were trying to convey something about Brando’s masculinity, which seemed obvious in the Schneider interview when, years later, she said she felt a little raped. Subrin picks up the story from there and gets a number of actresses to channel their own retouched versions of the interview, now that certain things can be said publicly. Overall, the format was very welcome in its novelty and Nyrabia, the festival’s leader, mascot, and spokesperson, turned the session into a film experience.
Elsewhere, Nishtha Jain spoke about her film The Golden Thread concerned with the jute-making factories of India; it is a pearl of immersive sound design. The factory workers speak about their pains and the imminent loss of jobs. It’s never clear what will save them from this loss — but their stories have been told. And while this isn’t the ideal solution to their problems, it is why documentaries are important and one reason, if anyone is looking, why IDFA exists and will retain its importance.
