2022 IDFA

<p>Set in a near-future New York City, Adaptation is a short science fiction film that depicts a waterlogged city utterly transformed by the traumatic consequences of today&rsquo;s irresponsible politics and economics. In the wake of these transformations, day to day life carries on for a group of relief workers&mdash;essential workers&mdash;whose jobs bring them into this new New York. Shot on film and produced using largely analog special effects&mdash;scale-models, miniatures, and matte photographs&mdash;Adaptation eschews the slick computer generated imagery that powers so much contemporary video art in search of a less seamless and more poetic science fiction.</p> <p>If the sea level rises drastically, it&rsquo;s not inconceivable that New York will disappear beneath the waves. Josh Kline built a drowned city of the future using stylized scale models and miniatures, and filmed on 16mm. A bright orange boat sails through Manhattan, where buildings still tower above the water. There is no sign of life. The once-crowded streets have disappeared below the surface of the ocean.</p> <p>The contemplations in the commentary are both poetic and somber&mdash;musings about the water, which is not only polluted with all the rubbish humanity produces, but also filled with disappointment and sadness.</p> <p>Like a Noah&rsquo;s Ark with humans as its only species, the solitary ship carries a small party of survivors. Everyone boards in full diving gear and is thoroughly disinfected. They chat over a beer and watch as the skyline of the ominously silent city seems to be sinking beneath the sea like a sunset.</p>

<p>AFRICAN MOOT follows four law student teams from across Africa as they travel to Botswana to compete in the largest mock court competition on the continent.</p> <p>Every year, over a hundred of the most talented law students from across the African continent gather in a different capital city to compete at the prestigious African Human Rights Moot Competition, the largest mock court competition in Africa. At the competition, these young aspirant lawyers act as both prosecution and defense in a cutting-edge human rights fictional court case, each hoping to win the case and bring back the trophy to their home country. This year&rsquo;s case focuses on the rights of refugees.</p>

<p>Activist Nan Goldin and artist Nan Goldin are inextricably bound up with one another in this candid documentary on the groundbreaking American photographer. Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras (<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/48a13978-fcf4-4670-b1af-0562e3037507/citizenfour">Citizenfour</a></em>) interviews Goldin about her life and what drives her. Poitras illustrates Goldin&rsquo;s personal narrative with photographs and footage of the protests she has organized.</p> <p>Goldin left home at a young age, and had her breakthrough as a photographer with&nbsp;<em>The Ballad of Sexual Dependency</em>, a series of intimate snapshots featuring her friends and herself. Nowadays, she devotes her energies to her activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which stands up for people addicted to painkillers and fights the producers of these medications, the Sacklers. This family has made billions of dollars from sales of OxyContin, contributing to the opioid crisis in the US.</p> <p>Goldin speaks from experience: she was prescribed the painkiller following an operation, and was immediately hooked. Back then, she only knew the Sacklers as the philanthropists who sponsored leading museums&mdash;museums in which her own work was on display.</p>

<p>What if from one day to the next, you&rsquo;re no longer seen, but instead are stared at? The leading characters in this multi-layered film have ended up in a new world where suddenly nothing seems to align. In their new lives in the Netherlands, they unintentionally provoke reactions on a daily basis. Even after many years, they still hear the same questions over and over again: where are you from, do you speak Dutch, do you tan in the sun?</p> <p>This experience is all too familiar to director Niki Padidar, who left Iran when she was 7. In&nbsp;<em>All You See</em>, she enters into painful and humorous conversation with three others who are immigrants. There&rsquo;s Khadija, originally from Somalia, who has been a &ldquo;newcomer&rdquo; for 27 years, Sophia, who has just come over from the UK, and Hanna from Ukraine, who watches cartoons and films to learn how to blend in and not constantly seem like a tourist.</p> <p>In Padidar&rsquo;s carefully designed film, these conversations are interspersed with her visual exploration of what it means to be subjected to the projections of others, and the alienation it evokes. How long can a newcomer be considered new?</p>

<p>This is the story about a ghost people who live in a ghost territory.&rdquo; Thus begins this richly documented history of the struggle for recognition of the Sinixt, one of Canada&rsquo;s indigenous peoples. While other indigenous peoples have legal rights, the Sinixt have none, because they are officially extinct. But the fact is they&rsquo;re still there.</p> <p>Passionate Sinixt matriarch and activist Marilyn James is among those who have been fighting for decades to correct this injustice and bring about a cultural revival. Archaeological research, fierce protests and complicated lawsuits have already brought results and new awareness, but the battle is not yet over. The fact that part of the Sinixt territory is in the United States further curtails their freedom.</p> <p>The work of filmmaker Ali Kazimi deals with race, social justice, migration and history. He has followed the bizarre story of the Sinixt since 1995 and now interweaves his own recordings, archive footage, home movies and meetings with those involved to create a wide panorama. The magnificent landscapes feature prominently as a backdrop.</p>

<p>Death is a topic that children rarely talk about, although at times it&rsquo;s something they have to deal with. What ideas do they have about dying and how do they see life? What are their experiences with death, and what do they think comes after it? In a relaxed atmosphere, a group of children aged nine and older exchange thoughts with elderly people, sometimes responding to each other as well. For one group, death seems distant, while for the other it is closer.</p> <p>These cleverly edited conversations form the basis of&nbsp;<em>Beyond Our Stars</em>. A girl explains how she felt at her grandfather&rsquo;s funeral&mdash;while she was very sad, the adults mostly&nbsp;seemed to be happy. The stories are illustrated with cut-out animations to which the children have clearly contributed. Both a living and a dead rabbit feature as characters. The speakers themselves also appear briefly&mdash;not talking, but watching, laughing and dancing. Perhaps it is liberating to talk about death and the emotions it brings.</p>

<p>A contemplative, patiently crafted portrait of three members of the Black Mambas, an ambitious group of South African women who protect Big Five game animals from poachers in Kruger National Park. It&rsquo;s a dream job that empowers women, or so it seems. But does the organization&mdash;run by white and mostly male compatriots&mdash;see them primarily as a marketing tool?</p> <p>While the founder of the Black Mambas extols the virtues of tourism and the economic impulse it provides, his female employees know from experience that neighboring communities don&rsquo;t benefit. When we see them at home, we find out that the men in their families can&rsquo;t find jobs, meaning huge pressures fall on the women&rsquo;s shoulders.</p> <p>Little by little this film, which won awards at CPH:DOX and other festivals, presents a complex picture of the shady side of nature conservation. Besides the three women, who each have a different perspective on their position, we also hear from a man driven to poaching by hunger. In between, the founder perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence of his organization with the observation that Kruger Park is the last bastion of old colonial attitudes.</p>

<p>In her lecture &ldquo;Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,&rdquo; filmmaker Nina Menkes dissects the use of the visual idiom of film as an instrument of the heterosexual male gaze. The sections of this startling lecture that form the framework for this documentary are illustrated with about 175 clips, as well as interviews with filmmakers such as Catherine Hardwicke and Julie Dash, and film theoretician Laura Mulvey, whose famous essay on the male gaze is at the heart of Menkes&rsquo;s analysis.</p> <p>Drawing on scenes from classics such as&nbsp;<em>Raging Bull</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Lost in Translation</em>, as well as cult films including&nbsp;<em>Superfly</em>, Menkes shows how women are systematically filmed differently than men&mdash;an example being how framing and lighting are repeatedly used to position women as passive objects of lust. Menkes argues that this persistent approach to representing women in fiction is far from harmless. By connecting the dots between gender discrimination on the work floor and sexual and other forms of violence against women, she reveals the all-too real impact of that ubiquitous portrayal.</p>

<p>J&oacute;zsef works at the largest still-operational grain silo in Budapest. He&rsquo;s been doing this work for more than 30 years, and lives in a container home next to the structure, where trucks and trains rumble past his window. When he is lowered into the ten-story-deep silos to clean them, he looks like a scuba diver at work. These scenes are captured with stunning, contrast-rich camerawork, and ably edited with a strong sound design.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s dangerous work for J&oacute;zsef, not least because he has been exposed to crop dust for many years now. The growing threat to his health could even lead to his death. But he can&rsquo;t escape it. In fact he seems to have become an integral part of his environment. In the sublime closing scene, he performs a dazzling, dizzying dance in the silo&mdash;strapped to safety cables, but flying nonetheless.</p>

<p>Animation artist Maarten Isa&auml;k de Heer was astonished by the huge number of animal deaths in his direct environment: from masses of fruit flies all dying together, to mice brought in by his own cat. He decided to make a record of all of the dead creatures he encountered over the course of a single spring and summer.</p> <p>Making 3D photograms of their sometimes semi-decomposed bodies enabled him to bring them back to life, so they can dance with a contemporary Adam and Eve in a paradisical landscape of twigs, leaves, bark and other dead organic material.</p> <p>The dome projection draws the viewer into this celebration of life after death. Along the way, this living tableau of cadavers becomes increasingly surreal, like a scene by Hieronymus Bosch. It&rsquo;s a danse macabre, but without any malevolent intentions. It goes beyond good and evil, simply illustrating the same biology that governs us all.</p>

<p>An examination of the human body as an extraordinary landscape that is also otherworldly and harrowing, from five hospitals in northern Paris neighbourhoods.</p>

<p>Suddenly, Siyi Chen is unable to reach her mother. The daughter suspects there&rsquo;s something amiss, and travels from America to the small town in China where she was born. It turns out her mother wasn&rsquo;t on vacation as she had claimed, but had had an operation. A tumor was removed, and it was malignant.</p> <p>Why didn&rsquo;t Siyi&rsquo;s mother tell her she had cancer? This is just the first in a long list of questions, in this tender feature-length debut in which mother and daughter examine their relationships with illness, with death, and with each other. While they start talking for the first time about their feelings and fears, a broader picture emerges of the toll that life as a healthcare professional can take.</p> <p>The filmmaker grew up at the local hospital where her mother is a doctor. Her mother hid her emotions behind a mask of rational calm&mdash;a mask that she passed on to her daughter. But now it seems some limits have been reached.</p>

<p>L&eacute;a tells the story of the Gasolineiras de Kebradas as it echoes through the walls of Colmeia, the women&rsquo;s prison of Brasilia: &ldquo;In 2019, I got involved with my sister Chitara in this crazy scheme she was caught up in. She had bought some land in a favela&mdash;oil pipes ran right under it, so she built this huge structure, tapped the oil, and started refining it right there and was making a lot of money. She set up a deal with the motoboys, so they would buy gas from her. She also had a stand at the market where she would sell it. Chitara also got mixed up in politics. She made history.&rdquo;</p>

<p>What does space sound like? In fact, like nothing at all&mdash;sound waves can&rsquo;t travel through the interplanetary void. But there&rsquo;s one place where space does have a sound: in the audiovisual universe of film and television. And untilStar Wars&nbsp;became internationally popular&nbsp;and dominated how we imagine space, the way it sounded in different parts of the world varied enormously. Does the angle from which you view the stars influence what you think they sound like?</p> <p><em>Echoes of Silence</em>&nbsp;is an audio experience with dome projections that takes the viewer on a trip into space as it&rsquo;s seen from different points on Earth. The stylized animations and images of starlit skies as they are observed from various parts of the world are accompanied by the sound of space used in films and television series at each location. In this way the project implicitly questions the predominant Western view of space. But most of all it highlights the universal sense of wonder about what lies far beyond our atmosphere<em>.</em></p>

<p>A forceful work of personal geography that makes visible the former Yugoslavia&rsquo;s traumatic breakup.</p> <p>The 1999 total solar eclipse visible from Serbia was met with anxiety by the population, taking place during a period of disintegrating Soviet lifestyles. Meanwhile, the genocides committed during the &rsquo;90s remain a fresh memory, but taboo, and many are eager to forget.</p> <p>Having left during the turmoil, Nata&scaron;a Urban returns to her home country to collect stories from family and friends. Uncanny images and double perspectives haunt this essayistic documentary, as tales of past selves&mdash;told languidly, with unexpected poetics and quiet ignorance&mdash; are paired with landscapes scarred by history. Memory, like the eclipses bookending the film, is elusive: it threatens to overwhelm, only to slip away before one can take it in.</p>

<p>From the first moments, there can be no doubt that this is a Rithy Panh film. His signature is unmistakable&mdash;we recognize the handmade, static figures and dioramas from&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/9a4981de-6714-41d7-92e1-439a0ed7289c/the-missing-picture" target="_blank">The Missing Picture</a></em>&nbsp;(2013), the first Cambodian film to be nominated for an Oscar. And as in&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/6bba32c1-10ad-4b63-a836-f78f9c0f020f/irradiated" target="_blank">Irradiated</a></em>&nbsp;(2020), Panh bombards the viewer with the horrors of the 20th century.&nbsp;<em>Everything Will Be OK</em>&nbsp;is a dystopian vision &agrave; la&nbsp;<em>Animal Farm</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Planet of the Apes</em>, with nightmarish sound design and a poetically political commentary.</p> <p>In a near future, during a pandemic, the animals have taken over. They treat humans in a way they learned from humans themselves, as we see through sometimes disturbing archive footage&mdash;from dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot; from the horrors of factory farming, which we see repeated on countless screens. Panh overlays this with cinematic references alluding to film classics such as&nbsp;<em>2001&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;<em>Metropolis</em>. The ironic title cites the T-shirt of democracy activist Kyal Sin, who was killed by Myanmar police in 2020.</p>

<p>Two women on a lonely island off the coast of Nova Scotia: Sable Island. Conservationist Zoe Lucas was an art student when she came there for the first time in the 1970s and has been living on this remote strip of land for decades now, mostly alone. Director Jacquelyn Mills films Lucas on her daily trips around the island to observe the local flora and fauna. Her studies of Sable Island&rsquo;s population of wild horses, for which the island is famous, and of the biodiversity there in general have made the self-taught scientist an esteemed expert. Collecting the alarming amounts of plastic washing up also forms part of Lucas&rsquo;s everyday life. Mills films on 16 mm, which lends a special beauty to the barren landscape. Science and art fuse in the two women&rsquo;s activities, each enriching the other. The movements of beetles are made into music. Horse manure provides useful data for Lucas and is just as useful for Mills&rsquo;s experiments in film exposure and developing, along with algae and other vegetation. When Mills loads the final film reel into her camera, it is not just the shoot that is coming to an end, but also a special encounter between two people. A twinge of melancholy is unavoidable.</p>

<p>In the heyday of the jute industry, millions of people in Bengal made their living doing this laborious work, which has hardly changed since the industrial revolution. The 100-year-old machinery has been endlessly repaired. State aid kept this sustainable alternative to plastic going, but its future looks bleak.</p> <p>In beautifully composed shots, Nishtha Jain (<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/b90aae64-acee-4d48-ac3c-bd49a555989f/gulabi-gang" target="_blank">Gulabi Gang</a></em>&nbsp;[2012],&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/f662baf7-d846-434a-a069-847c107150cf/lakshmi-and-me" target="_blank">Lakshmi and Me</a></em>&nbsp;[2007]) shows the last vestiges of the industry. She follows the entire production chain, from cutting and drying the reed along the river to weaving in two of the biggest mills in the area. Along endless rows of antique looms, the air thick with dusty fibers, workers carry out their routine work. Accidents and jammed machines are commonplace; workers&rsquo; faces reveal the exhaustion of a lifetime of labour.</p> <p>Meanwhile, the union is fighting for a minimum wage equivalent to 250 US dollars a month. During their break, the workers speak out. &ldquo;Nowadays nobody cares about quality, just more production,&rdquo; says one. Not long afterwards, one of the mills closes its doors after more than a hundred years.</p>

<p>This thought-provoking short film examines the meaning of the term &ldquo;public domain,&rdquo; and what happens to images whose copyright has expired and theoretically become freely available to all. Why is it that this type of image so often falls into the hands of commercial organizations such as Getty Images, which then requires payment to use them? What are the implications of putting images of historical events behind a paywall?</p> <p>Archive footage of events such as the 1937 Hindenburg airship disaster and the US atom bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in the 1940s and 50s are etched into our collective memory. This documentary argues that such images should not be held hostage by profit-motivated parties. It&rsquo;s a philosophy that the film itself puts into practice, ingeniously liberating this footage from the grip of commercial interests.</p>

<p>In&nbsp;<em>The Land</em>, Ivars Seleckis&rsquo;s measured, observational images capture the cycle of the seasons in a rural community in Latvia. Fifty years ago Seleckis shot another film in the same region:&nbsp;<em>The Corn-Bins</em>&nbsp;(1973), which documented a major shift in the country&rsquo;s agriculture. The upscaling of farming had already been started under Stalin&mdash;because groups were easier to control than individuals&mdash;and these huge farming concerns ushered in the collapse of traditional agriculture.</p> <p>In the meantime, increasing numbers of people have returned to the countryside. Seleckis focuses on five families to represent the diversity of human life in modern&nbsp;rural Latvia, accompanying these scenes with his own voice-over, filled with reflections about the essence of documentary making.</p> <p>He follows the farmers for a full year. Each has their own reason for living in the countryside. Some had had enough of office life and wanted to do real, tangible things, like digging a well or planting potatoes. Others are following in their father&rsquo;s footsteps and still working with century-old machinery. While one appears to be leading a harmonious life, another is desperately taking out loan after loan&mdash;opening up a highly topical discussion about the future of agriculture.</p>

<p>In 2015, Spanish environmentalists posted a video showing a dolphin trainer mistreating animals at the dolphinarium in Mallorca. It prompted an international scandal, because the trainer in question was Jos&eacute; Luis Barbero, who had just been appointed as vice president at the prestigious Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta in the US. Barbero had a reputation as a visionary trainer who, over the decades, radically changed the world of dolphin shows. This is a man who demands everything of himself, his staff and his animals. Was the video an indictment of the entire system or a deliberate attempt to destroy the reputation of one person?</p> <p>Two worlds collide in&nbsp;<em>The Last Dolphin King</em>. On one side stands the lucrative entertainment industry, which treats intelligent animals as valuable commodities. On the other are the animal rights activists who launch an all-out attack on the man and the sector he represents. When Barbero is reported missing, we discover that his past is as complex as his personality. Eyewitnesses describe a man who was increasingly trapped in an industry without a future.</p>