The Guest. Courtesy of IDFA
The 2024 edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam opened shortly after the world learned of two changes in leadership. One was at IDFA: Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia’s decision to step down at the end of his term, next summer, capping seven years as the festival’s second chief since its founding in 1988. (Nyrabia is also a board member of IDA, which publishes Documentary.) The other change took place thousands of miles away from the Netherlands but with global consequences: the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, a little over a week before the festival opened. Even if the spiritual drubbing of the election cycle had become numbing, the films that Nyrabia and his programming team had previously selected felt primed to respond to the challenges posed by Trump’s return to power, not just legislative but moral.
One theme that immediately sharpened in the wake of the election result is the nature of our responsibilities to one other, especially to the most vulnerable. In The Guest, a standout in the IDFA’s international competition, a Polish family provides safe haven to a Syrian refugee, Alhyder, who otherwise might be detained by border police, sent back across the EU border to Belarus, or simply perish in a cold forest. Instead of following Alhyder on his trek, directors Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz film him inside the house of the family, chiefly with Maciek, the father, and his wary wife and his teenage son. (The Guest won best cinematography in the international competition.) Silences, brief exchanges in halting English, waiting, and more waiting—such is the substance of the film’s psychological journey, a matter of trust and uncertainty. Alhyder waits for news of next steps, while Maciek’s family wonders if they are taking too big of a risk at a time when Polish law punishes the assistance of a refugee. Maciek regularly patrols near the forest at the border, looking for anyone in need of help, and the camera follows those efforts too. Like Agnieszka Holland’s justly lauded drama Green Border (2023), The Guest makes clear just how dire the odds are for these travelers of last resort.
Not everyone’s a Maciek, and indeed, some are disastrously the opposite, as shown in The Propagandist, an excavation of Dutch filmmaker and collaborator Jan Teunissen. Luuk Bouwman’s film made me think of Dorothy Thompson’s rapier-sharp 1941 essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Who Goes Nazi?”, in which she essentially looks around the room at a party and predicts who would and wouldn’t embrace the Third Reich, and why. The Propagandist details how Teunissen grew up rich and cultivated, and made pioneering but apparently not very good films for the Dutch film industry. When the Nazis invaded, he swiftly signed up and soon began running an official film program. Ostensibly this was out of a compulsion to keep making movies, but the movie’s centerpiece—an 1964–65 oral history interview with the oversharing, posh-accented Teunissen—makes clear that the man enjoyed associating with power and harbored biases that neatly dovetailed with the Nazi mission. But Bouwman takes his time in sketching Teunissen and doling out archival clips, doing the cinematic equivalent of slowly raising the temperature of the bathwater, until by the end, we’re in the presence of someone craven, shameless, yet at the same time still ordinary. To put it another way: he could, so he did.
Two other IDFA premieres examined the history of the Israeli occupation from different angles. Ayelet Heller’s The 1957 Transcripts uses recently released court transcripts and interviews with survivors, their relatives, journalists, and historians to recount the 1956 killings of 49 residents of the Palestinian village of Kafr Qasim. The brief description of the events is that Israel abruptly set a curfew that immediately put a target on the back of farmers and others who had left the village to work, who were then slaughtered upon their “late” return; the greater historical frame is that the cold-blooded maneuver reflected long-term Israeli strategic goals. The film’s “reenactment” of the transcripts amounts to a script read around a table, but it’s no less chilling to hear soldiers confirm their willingness to carry out such orders.
Somewhat more elliptical in interrogating intent was Dane Elon’s Rule of Stone, which examines the capture of East Jerusalem through the lens of the subsequent architectural re-ordering, using sit-down interviews and extensive historical photographs. Architect Moshe Safdie and others explain a plan to create a look for new Israeli construction that would make them look well-established, as if they had always been there in a way, by explicitly drawing on the model of existing Arab architecture. One Palestinian interviewee talks about the destruction of a house he had built for his family. Having delineated this process of effacement—Elon questions Safdie and colleagues about their role in displacing Palestinians, and the responses range from deflection (that the job of the planner is not responsible for the use) to something resembling regret, which in some ways is all the more galling. (Worth nothing: the winner of IDFA’s Audience Award was No Other Land, which led the voting early and stayed on top.)
Chronicling elected office, on a peculiarly American local level, Auberi Edler’s An American Pastoral circles a contentious 2023 school board race in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in classic verité fashion. The state of play is that MAGA-friendly candidates are spooking even other Republicans with schemes to ban books from school libraries and talking points that vilify Democrats. But Edler does not in turn villainize these fractious campaigners, even as she shows the increasingly steep odds faced by Democratic candidates who face opponents openly seeking to meld church and state and to exclude minority members of the community. All of this plays out in sun-shiney suburbs, with side vignettes at high schools and churches that stave off a purely horse-race tempo to the film. Here I will freely borrow my editor’s characterization of Edler’s approach as Tocquevillian: the French filmmaker casts a patient outsider’s eye on a rambunctious democracy, and the effect is liberatingly curious and largely free from the formulaic beats in many other documentaries about the workings of small-town American communities. Here we go, the film shows, driven down a shared road into unknown territory (a trajectory, temporary or not, that this year’s presidential election seemed to confirm).
Turning more inward, Irish artist Myrid Carten’s A Want in Her reflects upon her relationship with and obligations to her mother, a former social worker lost for years in cycles of alcoholic binges and homelessness. Throughout the film, Carten visits her uncle at his homestead, where a second, indigent uncle squats in a camper in the yard, full of opinions about the family. But her film also doubles back to footage of her mother in assorted states of engagement over the years: hanging out during a sojourn at home, acting in a video project of some sort (resembling in fur and shades some lost Warhol All-Star), or passed out on a bench in a city square, amid passersby. Carten’s camerawork is palpably handheld, sometimes embodying her ambivalence in scenes; other times she finds a desolate poetry in her indigent uncle’s postures. Strange ghostly views from ceilings (perhaps remotely filmed?) evoke the haunting of a beleaguered family or the spiritual out-of-body perspective triggered by the trauma. Carten also inserts a Clio Barnard-style lip-synch interlude, only to derail it, as if conceding the limits to transmuting the grief of the situation. All of this builds up to an inevitable crescendo—what should I do, what can I do—familiar to anyone who has ever cared for a loved one in dire straits.
Other IDFA films pared down their approaches to a bracing essence. In Omar Mismar’s 71-minute A Frown Gone Mad, a fixed camera watches clients recline for Botox in a salon in Lebanon, chatting about what parts of their face to have done and how, with asides about Israeli bombardment. These sometimes tough-to-watch treatments—faces jabbed with needles, blood welling up in dots—are interspersed with tinny Insta clips that appear to advertise salon discounts with war-themed wordplay. At first there’s a curiosity value of watching these intimate exchanges and procedures, then an understanding of the genuine palliative effect of this attention, beyond any cosmetic value (and despite what some might view as the predations of the beauty-industrial complex). But through repetition, and the mutual cajoling between clinic and client, one comes to feel the secret ache underneath it all, which Mismar’s very no-frills approach slowly lays bare. A Frown Gone Mad shared the directing prize in the festival’s formally adventuresome Envision section with a Venice premiere (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries).
The top prize in Envisions went to Chronicles of the Absurd, an audacious film from Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula starring Lynn Cruz in a series of confrontations with state police and other officials. Rendered mostly through hidden audio, avatars, and stills, it’s a (self-proclaimed, not incorrectly) Kafka-esque journey of an independent artist under fire—Cruz is a theater director and actress—and a record of the impoverished country’s surveillance state and tragic decline under an authoritarian regime. At a time when Cuba seems scarce in international news—only to pop up in a news break about a Netflix roll-out in Havana—Chronicles is a fascinating dispatch that freely tests the audiovisual bounds of documentary (as I explore with the filmmakers in their first interview, arriving in Amsterdam following blackouts in Cuba).
Maybe it was the present-tense urgency of the preceding movies that left me feeling slightly baffled that the top prize in the international competition was awarded to Trains, a found-footage film that steams through 20th-century wartime Europe. Not that Maciej J. Drygas’s ethereally scored work isn’t accomplished, marshaling multiple archives to fashion a continental history of people on or near trains, which necessarily means showing them going off to war and leisure. The pristine black-and-white footage revives some of this familiar material—facial expressions sparkle with spontaneous life—but it’s a tall order to re-tell the eras of World War I through World War II yet again after decades of such compilations. Drygas does harness the momentum of a train for a sense of history’s ineluctable forward motion, itself not a brand-new idea but deeply felt here. His selection finds wondrous verité-like moments in these pre-verité eras, especially “companion views,” from just behind a person looking out (stomach-churningly close in the case of Hitler on an apparent whistle-stop tour). The lucid resolution also renders the grisly toll of World War I newly personal and visceral, showing veterans with facial prosthetics, echoing a current fiction release, The Girl with the Needle, directed by Magnus von Horn, who’s thanked in the credits of Trains. Other scenes echo Steve McQueen’s Blitz with sequences of children shipped off for safekeeping during World War II, and the mothers and other caretakers left behind. The film is a compendium of sorts—one train contains a fully functioning cinema, where we see a snippet of Chaplin—though the way nations are stirred all together can be confusing. Yet Drygas has his reasons for revisiting this history: late in the film, just after World War II has concluded, we see a shot of utterly weary faces followed by one of tanks rolling by on a train, as if to a fresh conflict. Here we go again?
A few final shout-outs to other highlights from this year’s edition. Carmen Trocker’s Personale embeds with housekeepers at a hotel in the Italian Dolomites, who are run ragged keeping rooms clean and not getting in each other’s business. Shot with full permission from the hotel, it’s focused on the minutiae of the drudgery, the routine injustices, but also the camaraderie and the esprit of specific workers. One in particular deflects annoying demands—showing an inspiring regard for her psychological well-being—and recalls Anna Magnani. Undercover: Exposing the Far Right follows a savvy Bellingcat-grade operation called Hope Not Hate that infiltrates far-right groups ascendant in the U.K., which requires the adoption of long-term double-identities by its decent-seeming agents. At the public screening I attended, director Havana Marking, standing alongside two Hope Not Hate employees who appear in Undercover, said that the film had been slated to play in the London Film Festival but was pulled out of fear of rightist reprisals. Eloise King’s The Shadow Scholars exposes Kenya’s ghostwriting industry for international academic essays. It’s somewhat stiffly guided by Oxford prof Patricia Kingori, but also explodes with ideas about this alienated labor and identity, and the dystopian inequality it enforces. AI-concocted faces are imposed over the Kenyan ghostwriters interviewed, lending another layer of displacement to this portrait of exploitation. And lastly, I caught up with Radu Jude’s Sleep #2 (a screening followed by a dialogue with Nyrabia) in which the director of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World assembles footage from a live webcam facing Andy Warhol’s grave in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Its ironic, grainy picture of the afterlife and notoriety, occasionally populated by visiting tourists and deer, was a needed gesture of absurdity to break the tension in a festival of films that boldly stared at a burning world.
Nicolas Rapold is the host of the podcast The Last Thing I Saw, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, and former editor-in-chief of Film Comment. He is editing a book of interviews with Frederick Wiseman.