IDFA continues to weave its spell.
The biggest and best documentary film festival in the world has taken over the centre of Amsterdam, and I’m spending hours in darkened cinemas, emerging blinking into the light only for a change in venue or a loo stop before plunging in again. I feel like I’ve spent days jumping through windows that take me to a far flung corner of the world. For 90 minutes, I am submerged into a life so different from mine, I couldn’t have imagined it, yet somehow, there is always a point of connection.
I’ve visited the life of a Calcutta rickshaw puller My Barefoot Friend, made astonishing discoveries of the world of bees and bee lovers, Queen of the Sun. I was inspired at the story of Myo Myint, the crippled Burmese soldier turned peace activist Burma Soldier, wept with the mother of the daughters murdered by their father In The Name of the Family and was astonished by the story of the three year old Indian runner Buddhia and his adopted father Marathon Boy.
It’s not just the fact that usually the subject of the documentaries are all, in their own way, extraordinary but its the realization of how all these filmmakers struggled to bring their stories to the world. Most of the films on show here are the product of years of work on the part of the production team who’ve fought for funding and then struggled to film under occasionally terrible physical or emotional stress.
IDFA, I pay tribute.
You give us the best week of the year.
