Theatrical distribution of documentaries is getting more and more impulses. The documentary genre has received a publicity boost in recent years. Of course, there is the Michael Moore effect everybody is talking about, because of the astounding successes of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. Moore’s political messages have given the genre an incredible uplift. And there were European successes as well. Nicolas Philibert’s documentary Etre et avoir, which was seen by nearly two million people in France, created a buzz in the European documentary circle. The line between film festival and documentary festival is blurring. Michael Moore wins the Golden Palm in Cannes, and two highly appreciated films in Venice were documentaries, Darwin’s Nightmare and Three Rooms of Melancholia (both screening at the IDFA as well). In Venice, distributors from France, Germany and Italy were lining up to secure the theatrical rights for their countries. The representatives of both films could pick and choose among attractive offers for theatrical distribution. Just some years ago, these films would have been maybe multiple festival award-winners, but then they would end up in a late night screening on public TV networks. So something is definitely changing.
The facts are clear. Cinemas are now showing more documentaries, the media are starting to treat theatrical documentaries the same as theatrical fiction films, appreciating the genre as personal expression. The message has reached the audience as well, documentaries are not only objective and highly realistic films, they can be subjective and these strong, political, even aggressive opinions can be treated in a humoristic way.
The link between documentary and cinemas is becoming reality on an international scale. The Cinema Net Europe, supported by the MEDIA program, creates a specific space for European documentaries. The Dutch project DocuZone, part of the Dutch Film Foundation, developed this CNE. Eight countries in Europe are participating, and for example in the Netherlands there are 25 cinemas in the project. They all receive an advanced digital projection system, which they have to pay within five years. The first digital screening, the documentary Peace for One, made by the British filmmaker Jeremy Gilley, was the first digital film screened in the CNE, and has been projected in 180 cinemas at the same time. A big ambition for the distribution of documentaries, animation, experimental films and shorts, and maybe, this initiative, but the art-house distributors are less happy, because they are getting unfair competition from the government.
The funding of documentaries is changing too. Young filmmakers are producing films with no funding worth mention and paying no mind to television’s increasingly standardized format requirements. This new generation masters the technique and appears to have given up on television and public film-funding. At the IDFA, many filmmakers were asked the financing question at the Q&A, and it’s extraordinary how many of them told the audience they financed their film themselves. These filmmakers just go ahead and do it. Last summer in Italy, at the European Documentary Network workshop called Documentary in Europe, a great number (doubled since last year) of young Italian filmmakers applied. The funding for their films was scrounged from local funds, NGO’s, and they put up their own salaries. The message was clear, they wanted a place in Europe to show their works.

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam has numerous channels for showing, financing and selling documentaries. Showing docs is obvious, the festival has developed itself into a worth full exposing space, exposing a wide range of documentaries. These docs of course are getting some press attention, and they hopefully will attract distributors’ attention as well. But financing and developing documentaries is as important as selling them. One of the IDFA ways the fund a film is the Jan Vrijman foundation. The IDFA also provides documentary workshops, which results will be in the IDFA selection. This year’s workshop results were Communekind (Maroesja Perizonius), Dansmariekes (Maartje Bakers) and Jo de Roo (Ricardo Alvarez).

The main event for financing and co-financing documentaries, is the Forum. This is the documentary community’s key pitching project. For being selected, the rules state that participants should have at least 25 per cent of their financing already in place, but no more than 75 per cent. They have to operate as independent production companies, registered in MEDIA program member countries, although a restricted amount of projects from non-MEDIA program member countries (15%) can participate. A project needs to have the commitment of at least one broadcaster, film board or film institute.
There were 189 proposals for this year, 43 projects are selected, and they are being pitched to 120 commissioning editors representing 63 different broadcasters. The pitching is concentrated in the morning, when there are several shifts of four to five projects. This pitching is the core of the Forum, but the networking is, of course, crucial. That is why the delegates have lunch together after the pitching sessions, and spend the afternoon with meetings, considered an equally important part of the Forum. In general, an alarming trend seems to be the budget of the documentaries. It seems to be far higher than in previous years, and the means available are limited.
I visited one session of the Forum, and I was surprised how effective and efficient it worked. In 15 minutes, the representatives have to present their project. There are moderators to lead the discussion, and to ask financers directly if they are interested. Projects are presented by visual material, mostly a kind of trailer. Director, producer and broadcaster tell something about their project, and then the team of commissioning editors starts to ask questions. I didn’t expect them to ask questions about the content, but in almost all pitches there were discussions about artistic choices as well as financial choices. The length of the docs seemed to be a continuing problem. Almost all projects I observed were considered too long, and often the representatives were asked to cut down the length. After 15 minutes the moderator asks if there are any direct offers for financing or broadcasting, and then the next doc can be presented. It was clear that the broadcaster were well prepared, I had the impression that the pitches were only a formality; the real business is done in the meetings before and afterwards. But it does work; this year 10 documentaries selected for the IDFA are previous Forum projects.
Unfortunately, like the documentaries presented, the Forum has financing problems on its own. The event is budgeted at a little over 300.000 euro. The MEDIA program provides approximately 50 per cent, while the Ministry of Culture provides 30 per cent. The other 20 per cent of the financing comes from revenue and sponsorship. The Forum will receive funding for 2005, but no final decision has been made whether the event will continue to receive public money for the year 2006 and later on. Eleven years ago, the Forum was set up as an independent organization. Rather than being part of the IDFA, it was thought that this independent structure would make it easier to access Media program support. This set up could be the reason for the financial uncertainty nowadays. The IDFA might change its organization in order to become a formal part of IDFA, and then have access to funds from federal coffers.
Managing director Fleur Knopperts tells in the IDFA Daily (Monday 22 November) that she feels “the Forum and IDFA are inseparable and that the one strengthens the other. The festival is important for Holland and the Ministry of Culture is still supporting that. They have to support the Forum because if it ceased to exist, it would damage the festival”. She argues the Forum without the festival wouldn’t work. “The two events have to come together. That’s what makes Amsterdam during these ten days such an important event”. I think she is right. The Forum makes the IDFA a real international event, and it adds great value to the process of financing documentaries.

During the IDFA, industry meetings were organized to discuss and develop the business of documentary making, for example a very interesting one about the marketing of documentaries. I would like to mention some interesting points the panel made at this meeting, before I continue with the larger IDFA channel regarding selling, Docs for Sale. In the end, a filmmaker should think about marketing before he tries to sell his film.
According to the panel at the Marketing Reality Meeting, people concentrate on the front-end and forget about the back-end. “You should think about marketing the film the moment you come with the idea, and not when the film is already finished”, said director Peter Wintonick. “The day the film is finished, that’s when the real work starts. You have to devote at least a year or two if it’s a potential festival film, because you need to travel with it and make contacts with it”, according to Sirkka Moeller, programmer of the Sheffield International Documentary Festival. The panel discussed test screenings, common use in the Hollywood system, but mostly refused by European filmmakers because of the artistic identity. Jan Rofekamp of sales company Films Transit (Montreal) stressed the need to identify the target audience early on, because he thinks it’s a good idea to screen the film to see how people react. Wintonick agreed, “I worked in fiction films for a long time and every film was given a test screening. I’ve done a lot of re-cutting films long after the producer thought they were finished on the basis of test screening and audience feed back. The Hollywood system of feedback can guide you just before you finish or lock it down. Even after a film has played at the IDFA, filmmakers should still think about such things. Every documentary maker should adopt such fiction standards”. I already mentioned the current Michael Moore effect, and how documentaries are trying to get a theatrical release. The panel discussed this “current obsession”, because of the problems documentaries might have regarding theatrical distribution. They agreed on the question a filmmaker should ask himself, why does he want his film to be in the cinema, and does the film really have theatrical potential? Filmmakers have to look whether the film will work on the big screen, because many documentaries are made with a handheld DV camera, which causes a rather shaky effect on a big screen. So maybe TV release isn’t that bad at all.

The IDFA event regarding releasing the docs, theatrical or TV, is Docs for Sale. This event takes place together with the IDFA, and is held in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza Amsterdam American Hotel. Films have to be selected to participate in Docs for Sale, and they don’t have to be part of the IDFA official selection, they can be just participating at Docs for Sale. To be selected in Docs for Sale 2004, a documentary needs to have a creative nature, and it must have been completed after 1 September 2003. Film representatives pay a registration fee and have access to the Docs for Sale Desk and lobby.
This year, 415 films were selected, a reduction of 10 per cent to last year. This reduction has been made to make the market more manageable for buyers. There are viewing facilities, which are reserved for (TV) buyers, festival programmers and distributors. The ninth version of this sales platform provided 38 viewing booths this year, against 27 in 2003, due to the increase in buyers. It introduced a flat fee for buyers wishing to use its facilities. It was an unforeseen development, the fact that far more buyers showed up than last year. This is because broadcasters have been sending more than one person, for example the Finnish broadcaster YLE had six people attending the market. This increase in buyers caused slots at a premium, leading to complaints over long waiting time.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able yet to receive the top ten of most viewed documentaries, but during the IDFA it seemed nominated films weren’t the most popular films to view. This is an interesting development, and I hope to get more information about this soon, and about the sale of the award winning films. I think the IDFA creates strong new means to support the financing, selling and distribution of documentary and I will be following the effectiveness of these means later this year.

To conclude my article, I would like to present these award winning films and the jury comments. The Special Jury Prize this year went to Liberia: an uncivil war, directed by Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon, a film, according to the jury, “whose very creation was an act of bravery”. They received their prize “for courage under fire, a tenacious rejection of personal safety in pursuit of truth and its unblinking view of political betrayal and the absurdity of war.”
The 2004 Joris Ivens Award, the award for best feature documentary, went to the Dutch film De Stand van de Maan (Shape of the Moon), directed by Leonard Retel Helmrich, because it is “a work that embodies the pure joy of filmmaking, all the raw intimacy of a drunken relative and the eloquence of a song. While wading into the volatile issues of religion and politics in a profoundly undernourished society, it never loses sight of the value of its subjects, who are never romanticized, but are all the same never less than comically and tragically human”.
The Silver Wolf award, for best short documentary (less than 60 minutes), went to Georgi and the Butterflies, directed by Andrey Paounov, which “shows the struggle of the manager of an institution who dreams of better conditions for his patients. Avoiding the commonplace approach of a film on the mentally disabled, Andrey Paounov shows us that documentary filmmaking can be entertaining, moving and funny”.
The First Appearance Award, for debut documentaries made by new directors, was presented to Podul Peste Tisa, made by Ileana Stanculescu, a filmmaker who, according to the jury, “has tremendous potential and manages to tell a compelling story that has much wider implications with simple means. Her personal vision using the bridge as a universal metaphor results in a heartwarming portrait of people living in a divided region”.
The Doc U! Award for best children documentary was given to Nabila by Johan Bjerkner and Hakan Berthas. This film sets up an interesting portrait of a Swedish immigrant life. The jury chose this film because of the approaching of a difficult subject in a unique way. “An abstract, universal problem is shown without recourse to explicit explanation. A film in which all the ratio’s fit, the ones between filmmakers and characters, between the serious and the hilarious, between global issues and personal problems”.
The final award presented has been the Amnesty International Doen Award, for best human rights film. The winner of this award is The 3 rooms of Melancholia, by Pirjo Honkasalo, and the jury praised the way the documentary “keeps you focused on – and forces you to think about – how the fate of Chechen and Russian children is determined in times of war. It paints the horror and consequences of this violent powerful portrayals, the filmmaker makes splendid use of the medium of film and manages to create poetry. This poetic style is a powerful tool in capturing the complexity of a devastating reality”.
 

What happened in Cannes, Palme d’Or for Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11, was maybe not everybody’s cinematographic choice, but it did say one thing: the documentary is hot. It is becoming more integrated with the feature film, the boundaries are shifting and questions are rising. What is a documentary? How far can a documentary go with the usage of filmic aspects like creating smoke and real actors? The last years there has been a big debate, at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), on where the documentary is positioned. The film FORD TRANSIT from the Dutch director Hany Abu-Assad (2002), created a scandal at the festival two years ago when he ‘confessed’ that the main character in his documentary was an actor. It is a documentary that covers the boundaries between Israel and Palestine. He claimed that reconstruction is sometimes closer to the ‘real’ than the reality and the actor is actually living in the Palestinian region.
The question immediately rises: What is the objective of a documentary? Is it to inform, to touch certain themes, to stay objective, but then can we stay objective? Should it arouse questions, should it have a closing, should it be taken from the reality, but then what is reality? Documentary is a genre/style/reality that cannot be denied, it is present and it is getting more and more interwoven with the fiction film. Just as CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, CONTROL ROOM; YES MAN; SUPERSIZE ME, FAHRENHEIT 9/11 was a great stimulation for the documentary as a whole, whether is was a good documentary or not!
The IDFA is a documentary festival that takes place every year in November. It is one of the biggest and most respected documentary film festivals in the world, with this year 120 thousand visitors and already celebrating its 17th anniversary. The festival covers 259 films in different categories, lengths and forms, different forums and workshops. There are two main selections the Joris Ivens Competition, 20 documentaries with a minimum length of 60 minutes. The documentaries were selected by IDFA from nearly two thousand international contenders. A jury of five, consisting of John Anderson, Karen Cooper, Thom Hoffman, Pirjo Konkasalo and Yoav Shamir, judged the films. The award is a sculpture and a price of 12.500 Euros. The other main selection is the Silver Wolf Competition, 20 short documentaries less than 60 minutes in length. The jury members here are Erik Gandini, Wessel van der Hammen, Irina Kanousheva, Björn Koll and André Pâquet. The award is a prize of 10.000 Euros and broadcasting by a Dutch broadcaster.
Other selections are the First Appearance, where young and new filmmakers have their own competition program, Reflecting Images, where special documentaries with challenging content and form are featured in this section. Films that have created a buzz on other festivals and venues such as HENRI LANGLOIS THE PHANTOM OF THE CINEMATHEQUE, MEMORIA DEL SAQUEO and WHAT REMAINS OF US. The Jan Vrijman Fund will be discussed later, but poses every year a certain 20 documentaries to the foreground from Third world countries.
Lengths differ, but also form isn’t a closed subject, this year there was a short documentary made with cellular phones and also several radio documentaries. The
Documentary Festival Amsterdam crosses borders and touches everything that has to do with documentary with a worldwide perspective.
 

One of the main discussions during the IDFA was the discussion about the Direct Cinema or the ‘Cinéma Verité’. It is a genre/style within the documentary that had a revolution in the early 1960’s. The way of filming claims certain objectivity from the director where he takes as much distance from the subject and the things he or she is filming. The fly-on-the-wall principle is key, according to many, to take this distance. The directors should take the newest and lightest cameras possible to stay flexible and close to their subject. The main goal during the shooting is to registrate. The director doesn’t start with a straight objective; he or she would just shoot film. Afterwards, the montage would give the story a direction or a certain depth. During the IDFA there was a big debate around the Direct Cinema, where the ‘godfathers’ of this style were present. Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman debated about the past, present and the future of Direct Cinema. Their films, which among others were PRIMARY, DON’T LOOK BACK, SALESMAN and TITTICUT FOLLIES are still considered very important and are basic material for every film student. For example the film TITTICUT FOLLIES(1967) shows us an institute in Massachusetts, USA, for the mentally ill convicts. The film was a big controversy, because it showed the abuse of the patients from the guards and the doctors. The camera registrates all kinds of different angles of the institute, the way the patients are being treated, what they do all day and how the personal handles that. The camera is present, but tries not to judge. There was about 200 hours of film cut into a normal length documentary of 84 minutes.
During the debate some given qualities of the direct cinema were discussed.
Albert Maysles argues the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ principle; according to him ‘the fly’ has no soul, no brain. The best way to describe direct cinema according to him is to call it ‘uncontrolled cinema’. You never know what is going to happen, and at the same time there isn’t always a necessity that something happens. The thing that is most important is that there grows an intimate relation, you can create that by being honest and open with your camera and through the emotions you show. According to Maysles art is often made without purpose, there doesn’t always have to be an objective like Micheal Moore claims. Registration can bring art, for many arts have been made without certain objectives.
Frederick Wiseman, says that there was too many weight put on the subject. ‘Bullshit’ he said when they asked him what Cinéma Verité really meant. Cinéma Verité according to him is just another stupid French term. It is way out of everybody’s league to pretend that we can claim objectivity with cinema. It is already really nice if we can give our own version of the reality.
The discussion as a whole was mainly an ode to the godfathers, but also the present and future of the Direct Cinema was discussed.
Is Direct Cinema still alive? According to many the Direct Cinema is still present in the documentaries, the example of the documentary that won the Joris Ivens Award last year, CHECKPOINT, was given many times. Also the hybrid to feature films has been made. Films like THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL and films from Dogma show a certain openness and freedom seen at the Direct Cinema, just like the films from the brothers Dardenne. On another Media-level we can also find the influence in the Reality-TV, what is not by everybody seen as the best development. Maysles believes in the future of the documentary, he argues that Reality-TV doesn’t deserve the label of a documentary, it can lead to abuse and disrespect, but it might open viewers up to non-fiction. The debate on Direct Cinema hasn’t come to an end, it is still alive and will be more integrated in our lives. We will probably hear more about the Direct Cinema, just as the ongoing debate about the boundaries of the documentary will never close.
 

The Jan Vrijman Fund was funded in 1998. It is a Fund with an objective to help finance creative documentary projects from developing countries, as shown on the DAC-list.
The makers often come from countries where there are few or no resources for the production of independent films. In some cases, the influx of applications correlates to the level of political unrest or change in a country. A big example of this was the economic crisis in Argentina, it lead to a really big amount of documentary concentrating on the crisis, from a personal and also from a national point of view.
The financial help can be given in different stages of the film development like research en script development, production and post-production, distribution and sales. The Fund also stimulates other activities on an ad hoc basis, for the promotion of the production and distribution of documentaries such as the organization of workshops other educational programs and Film Festivals. The basic principle for supplying for the fund is that the projects are not realized. The different contribution change from 15.000 Euros for other activities to 4.000 Euros for script and project development and they show the films they stimulate at the festival in exchange the Fund gains the rights of the documentaries in the Benelux. The Fund receives around 350 applications from an average of 50 different countries.
It was funded in the name of Jan Vrijman (1925-1977) who was the inspiration and Co-Founder of the IDFA and directed and produced over 50 films.

Each year, IDFA screens many documentaries realized with support from the Jan Vrijman Fund. This year’s crop was the biggest so far and yields 27 films, eight of which have been included in the three competition programs. I AM CUBA; A SEBERIAN MAMMOTH, THE GREAT COMMUNIST BANK ROBBERY and THE VEIL OF BERTA were selected for the Joris Ivens Competition. CHILDREN OF THE DECREE; THE OTHER SIDE OF BURKA and LA STRADA competed for the Silver Wolf Award. Other films competed also in The First Appearance Program.
There is a shift taken place in the Fund. While before the ten new countries from the EU could ask for a contribution they are now excluded from the Fund. It brings the Fund even further away from its region and in the selection it is clear that Africa, South America are the two biggest countries within the Jan Vrijman selection but also Iran and India are getting more heard.

The levels of the films differ and the selection is wide. A thing that we immediately notice is the quality of the film, from which we can immediately deviate that the means are little. The subject is often the driven force behind the documentaries. Most of the themes are regional like the film BLACK AGAINST WHITE from Wagner Morales, Brazil. A film filled with humor, and global acknowledged problems. It is a documentary that tells the story of one of the southern suburbs in São Paulo where every year there is a soccer match between the white and the black people. The only problem is that there is no straight definition of blacks and whites, as said in the movie some are chocolate and some are white while people might argue. Morales plays with technical means, black and white and colored images and talks about the problems that the crew is wrestling with, to illustrate the themes shown in the documentary. The soccer match is seen as a fraternization of all, but at the same time people are still making insinuating jokes like calling the blacks monkeys. It is a story that is well brought and could even be seen in a global view.
AS SABANAS DE NORBERTO (NORBERTO’S BEDSHEETS) is a documentary from Argentina filmed by Hérnan Khourian. The documentary starts with the body of a man and his voice, bit by bit the camera reveals more of his body but never more than bits and pieces every time. It is a man who is blind and has serious breathing problems. He has been in a hospital bed since the late fifties and he can’t think of another life. All he has is his clay, a keyboard and the sound of a respirator that annoys the viewer like it should probably annoy him. All he does is waiting to be washed and waiting till the next visitor of that year comes to see him. It is totally shot in black and white and gives us only certain parts of his body like he might see it. It takes pauses for the viewer to breath between the harsh images and the annoying sound of the respirator. It poses questions like what are we doing in our society leaving sick people like that alone and lonely. These questions are again global, but the film was too long and persistent to pose these questions during the film.
Another film in the Fund was TCHALA, L’ARGENT DES REVES (TCHALA, THE CURRENCY OF DREAMS) where the idea of ‘going to bed poor and waking up rich’ is the main theme of the film. The film concentrates around the lottery in Haiti; it shows that everybody is playing it no matter which race, social class or age. It is a game that gives people hope, and is sometimes the only hope. ‘If I don’t win the lottery tomorrow I can’t pay my child’s school fair’. The lottery is drawn every day and every small village is included, because there are salesmen who walk from town to town to sell their numbers. The film shows the viewer a new kind of religion that brings hope. A privately run lottery, that is so influential that people don’t see it as gambling, but as a part of life. The documentary shows us a tradition that is national to Haiti, but on the other hand we could interpret it to the hope we search for and the dangers of gambling in a bigger perspective.

These films are just three examples given of the big amount in total at the festival, 28 and 19 in the selection of the Jan Vrijman Fund. The quality of the documentaries differ a lot, you can find extremely amusing and good documentaries and also some that are not challenging at all. In any case, the documentaries open new doors to otherwise unseen regional or national lives. It is a Fund with an objective that is hard to find nowadays. The new talents should be sought here; there are so many new filmmakers who don’t get a chance. The Jan Vrijman Fund can be compared to the Hubert Bals Fund at the Rotterdam Filmfestival and it is clear that these Funds are a quality brand. Both set a certain standard and are not afraid to explore new boundaries.
 

The question if documentary is a genre of cinema or a different kind of art bothered me for a long time. The festival shows a lot of documentaries that deal with the society we are in right now. The most popular themes were terrorism, the conflict between Israel and Palestina, the grieving situations in developing countries and the regional happenings. There is a split between the problems we are all aware of from a directors view and new windows opening to new worlds of what the director most of the time wants us to be aware of. The themes are crucial and also in the descriptions of the many films the themes are the only subject.
The link to cinema in a sense that the image is the message is easily made, because either celluloid or videos are the means to bring it to the public. But where cinema is trying to achieve the ‘art’ brand, where does the documentary fits in? At the IDFA there were so many documentaries that showed great themes, but what about the esthetics? For me the lack of esthetics in so many documentaries created even a bigger distance between the documentary and the fiction film. The photography is often not even to be found and I am aware of the way of shooting documentaries. The shooting is not that organized, often with a ‘right now’ idea, but still in many films the photography in shots that were prepared is sometimes not even present. At the IDFA the level of esthetics was low, especially in the sections from the Jan Vrijman Fund and the First Appearance, while at the same time the selection Reflecting Images showed big documentaries like THREE ROOMS OF MELANCHOLIA and DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE. Films, and especially the first, that make the circle complete, the Three Rooms of Melancholia has a perfect equilibrium between themes, narrative, structure and esthetics as many appraised fiction films.
These films were scarce, from my point of view, the level of documentaries is big at the IDFA concerning themes, information and opening new windows to yet unseen worlds but concerning esthetics the documentary is losing territory. Maybe it is because critics shouldn’t see the documentary as the same medium as the fiction film, and again we end up at the question what the objective of the documentary is. If it wants to be considered as art, it should be treated as art and from my point of view the art-level at the IDFA was very low. On the other hand, the level of esthetics found in documentaries was many times discussed at the festival and the winner of the Joris Ivens Award, STAND VAN DE MAAN (THE WAY THE MOON STANDS) Leonard Retel Helmrich (Holland), was appraised for its great esthetics, even though it was shot in video. Maybe the award is a way to create a bigger bridge between fiction and documentary. A bridge that is already present on many levels, concerning direct cinema and also the fictional elements in the documentary and might become even bigger on the level of esthetics.
 

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