Our favourites from IDFA 2019 and this year's award-winners

This year, Doc Weekly was among the thousands of filmmakers, producers, journalists and doc-lovers who make the annual pilgrimage to Amsterdam’s IDFA. With the festival coming to a close this weekend, we thought we’d share our highlights from the past couple of weeks and the festival’s award-winners along with a sneaky peek at some of our upcoming content.

Sunless Shadows

Opening the festivities with its World-Premiere, Mehrdad Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows was a hit with both the audience and the jury, earning him IDFA’s first ever Award for Best Directing. Motivated by a duty of “giving a voice to the voiceless”, Mehrdad’s film follows two groups of Iranian mothers, daughters and sisters that have been found guilty of murdering their father, husband, or brother-in-law. One younger group is in a rehabilitation centre, while an older group, many of them the mothers of the first group, await their sentence on death row.

Although their stories can be difficult to hear, this is also an intimate portrayal of loving family relationships and forgiveness. When we put this to Mehrdad he went one step further, saying that “this is a film about love“. We’ll be sharing our video interview in the coming days and stay tuned for a release date of Sunless Shadows in 2020.

Wintopia

After her father Peter Wintonick passed away in 2013, Mira Burt-Wintonick discovered his “Utopia” tapes, an ecclectic, surprising and rich trail of video footage that he collected in his global search for utopia on earth. The resulting Wintopia is an existential film that ponders her relationship with her sometimes distant father, a larger than life documentary filmmaker who continues to be sorely missed by both the IDFA community and his native Canada, where he is widely considered the country’s most influential documentary filmmaker.

Mira admits that she may have thrown herself too soon into the project, with her immediate grief eventually taking its a toll on her progress and forcing a two-year break. Her father’s poor labelling of the tapes and illegible handwriting also slowed her progress, relying on clues such as street signs to pinpoint some of his filming locations. But in the end, its that very loose structure and mystery that gives Peter’s footage its enigmatic character, drawing you further and further along his expedition that unfortunately had to end too soon. We discussed this and more in our interview with Mira, coming soon.

Mira Burt-Wintonick speaking with Benjamin Hollis at IDFA 2019.

Battle

Caio Caster, Rica Saito and Benjamin Hollis at IDFA 2019.

On the eve of Jair Bolsonaro’s election, Brazil’s political tensions reached a climax. Directors Caio Castor, Rica Saito, Clara Lazarim and Guilherme César were on the streets of Sao Paulo interviewing voters, when their cameras caught lightning in a bottle.

Over the course of about fifteen minutes, Battle successfully captures how a conversation to camera escalated to a debate with other passersby, then to a forceful argument, and eventually to a running battle of shouts, accusations and political chanting.

Facing unprecedented cuts to their funding under Bolsonaro’s government, Caio and Rica only just made it to this year’s IDFA and we were keen to find out about the changes underway in Brazilian society and their fears for the future. Our interview will also reveal their plans to make a feature film on the same subject, more info coming soon.

The Sea Between Us

The increasingly divisive politics of countries across the world, like Brazil, inspired director Marlene Edoyan to return to Beirut and put her country’s own divisions under the microscope. Here, it has been 25 years of peace since the civil war that pitted christians, sunnis and shiites against each other. But for some, the wounds never healed, and the steady stream of Syrian refugees entering the country is putting a fragile peace under strain.

The Sea Between Us is an intimate and atmospheric observation of how simmering, hard to perceive social divisions can be found anywhere. Marlene told us the unlikely way that she met one of her main protagonists and the importance her crew granted to incorporating the sounds of Beirut into the film’s soundtrack.

Other breathtaking films that we had the opportunity to catch during IDFA included the mesmerizing Cordillera of Dreams by master filmmaker Patricio Guzman, an emotional dive into the Chilean psyche after years spent under the thumb of an oppressive economic regime and millenia spent at the foot of one of the world’s most intimidating mountain ranges.

There was Scheme Birds, a shocking portrait of the tough life of a teenager in Motherwell, Scotland, a town rid of its identity and wealth by Margaret Thatcher’s closing of the steel plants in the 80s and 90s.

And we also caught the much-hyped The Collective, Alexander Nanau’s exposé of the Romanian healthcare system’s fatal levels of corruption, which was met with an impressive standing ovation after its projection at the Tuschinski Theatre on Tuesday.

You can read more on this year’s IDFA award winners at this link, congratulations to them and a big thank you to the IDFA team and the beautiful city of Amsterdam for having us. Thanks also to the wonderful Paolo Hollis for the camera work.

Follow us on social media to see all our video interviews from IDFA 2019, and more, in the coming weeks.