IDFA chief Orwa Nyrabia promises “Instant Classics” at Doc Festival

The 37th^th edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam is well under way, having opened with the world premiere of a film that can be called part non-fiction, part fiction, part real and part artificial.

About a hero stars Werner Herzog, or an AI facsimile thereof, and uses a famous statement of his as a starting point: the German filmmaker once famously remarked, “A computer won’t make a movie as good as mine in 4,500 years.” To put it to the test, director Piotr Winiewicz worked with machine learning engineers to task AI with writing a script based on Herzog’s body of cinematic work (Herzog allowed the venture).

The result is a story about the possible suicide or murder of a man in a German industrial town who worked for a company developing a mysterious “infinity machine”. A supporting character has a passionate affair with a toaster (not sure what that says about Werner Herzog or the AI’s “mind”).

About a hero is one of a dozen Baker films in the International Competition at IDFA, almost all of them world premieres. Overall, the festival will present 254 documentaries and 27 new media projects.

“I think we have a brilliant programme,” says IDFA artistic director Orwa Nyrabia. “We have very strong competition. I dare say there will be classics here. There are some truly brilliant films.”

This is Nyrabia’s 7^th and last year lead the festival. Earlier this month, he announced that he would step down in July 2025.

“Don’t feel sad,” Nyrabia tells Deadline. “If you trust me, trust me on this too, that this is the right time, this is the right time to do this for everyone’s benefit, for IDFA’s benefit and for me.”

A native of Syria, Nyrabia succeeded IDFA co-founder and longtime festival director Ally Derks in 2018. During his tenure, he had to negotiate the pandemic, and last year he faced one of his biggest challenges when protests broke out at the festival over Israel’s invasion of Gaza after October 7^th Hamas sneak attack on Israel. IDFA could have played it safe this year by avoiding content from that part of the world, but in fact the 2024 program is brimming with films from Israel, Palestine and Lebanon. Among them are Gaza’s eyesa “portrait of hell” that follows “three Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza as they are forced to put their lives on the line while trying to do their job,” as the IDFA program writes.

“This is a film, I believe, the first to emerge from the newly minted OTT platform of the Al Jazeera network, called Al Jazeera 360,” notes Nyrabia. “This film is particularly interesting because it is, in a way, a reportage that sticks to these three journalists on the ground in Gaza. In a way, by staying with them – when they sleep and when they wake up, when they see their children and when they go to work – it makes that kind of reportage a little more relevant for a festival like IDFA.”

Presentation in the International Competition is the world premiere of Stone ruledirected by Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Danae Elon. “Stone rule is an exceptional film that looks at the history of Jerusalem as a city and architecture as an enforcer of colonial power,” notes Nyrabia.

He also quotes The transcripts from 1957directed by Israeli filmmaker Ayelet Heller, noting that it is a film “built on recently revealed documents from Israeli archives about a massacre that occurred in 1957, in which the inhabitants of a Palestinian village within the borders of Israel were massacred in one day, and all the perpetrators were later acquitted.”

IDFA also shows the film from 2003 Route 181, Fragments of a journey in Palestine-Israela documentary directed by Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi and Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, which Nyrabia sees “as a commentary on simplistic identity politics, where we only imagine a conflict between inherited identities. So people who belong to this heritage fight against the others , belonging to a different heritage. And I think there is another, a third way that creates a new identity, which is the identity of filmmakers who come together around an ethical position, which come together around making films with a real belief in solidarity with those who are oppressed.”

In its Best of Fests section – limited to top documentaries from around the world that premiered at previous festivals – IDFA will showcase Oscar contenders No other countrywinner of the main prize for documentary at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Set in a rocky and remote area of ​​the West Bank where Palestinian villagers are subject to an expulsion order from the Israeli Defense Forces, the film is directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. No other country was supported by a grant from IDFA’s Bertha Fond.

“If people saw the great documentary works done by different filmmakers from different backgrounds about this history of the Arab-Israeli conflict or about Palestine-Israel, I think, to say the least, what happened last year (on October 7^th) would not have been a surprise if it had not been avoided in the first place,” comments Nyrabia. “There is so much for one to become cynical about what we can do. But I also think that after all this terrible year (of violence), watching new movies, even watching the old movies, takes on a different meaning. It will be a different experience, and I hope it helps.”

Along with No other countrymovies in the Best of Fests section include Cane and Blink (both from National Geographic), War games, Union, State of silence, Sabbath QueenMTV Documentary Films’ Black Box Diary, Agent of happiness from Bhutan and Asif Kapadia’s 2073.

IDFA’s Guest of Honor this year is the Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, director of the Oscar-contending film The soundtrack to a coup d’état. The documentary explores a key moment in history in the late 1950s and early 60s, when many African countries were gaining their independence after long eras of colonial rule. But in the case of Congo, Belgium and the United States were reluctant to cede the country’s mineral wealth after the election of Patrice Lumumba as Congo’s first democratically elected leader. Belgium, the United States and even the UN Secretary General conspired to oust the charismatic pan-African politician.

Nyrabia describes Grimonprez as a “one-of-a-kind, exceptional arthouse filmmaker who brings together the artistic sensibility and the language that is truly unique with very serious political, historical research. He does this in a very special way. It is very much the , I would love to see more of that in the documentary space.”

IDFA runs from 14.-24. November in the Dutch capital. On the heels of the US presidential election, in which border security became a leading issue, the festival offers a topical section called Dead Angle: Borders, a showcase of 17 films that touch on the issue in one way or another. The board contains On the borderset in the desert city of Agadez in Niger, which has been a “hub of trade routes since time immemorial,” as the program notes. “But Agadez is also a place where migrants pass through on their way to Europe.”

The guestdirected by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz, revolves around the border of Poland and Belarus, where a long wall was erected by Poland to keep out mainly Arab refugees. In the film, a Polish family takes in “an exhausted Syrian refugee, the 27-year-old Alhyder… Without a hint of sensationalism, the camera reads the emotions on the faces of the silent Polish family members and their grateful guest. The situation is serious and a solution remains out of reach.”

“I’m very happy that we’re doing the side program we call Dead Angle. This is a multi-year programme. Every year we will look at one ‘blind spot’ through film,” explains Nyrabia. “We decided, okay, let’s think about borders this year… these lines that nations put between them and die for them; there’s a certain absurdity to the concept of borders. I think borders are definitely one of the main question of history at this moment, like how do we see the relationship between different groups of people, between different countries and their borders?

Nyrabia continues: “(Dead Angle: Borders) really became a very telling program, going all the way from the notion of a ‘fortress Europe’ closing its borders against the other, to the history of Palestine-Israel and the moving border. that became created in ’47 but keeps moving all the time and keeps being contested or keeps being at the center of the problem.”

Sometimes only after the festival program is selected do thematic elements come together, adds Nyrabia. “A lot of ideas that when you’re working (on the show) they’re separate ideas, but when they come together you realize you’ve worked in a kind of synergy, even though it wasn’t all schematically planned, but it comes together .”