IDFA Chief On Decision To Ban Israeli State-Backed Orgs From Festival

In her welcoming letter to IDFA guests, the festival’s new artistic director Isabel Arrate Fernandez writes, “In these uncertain times we need the voices of filmmakers and artists more than ever.”

As if responding to that call, some of the greatest documentary filmmakers of our time are bringing new work to the 38th edition of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam: Laura Poitras, Vitaly Mansky, Victor Kossakovsky, Mstyslav Chernov, Tamara Kotevska, Susana de Sousa Dias, Raoul Peck, Gianfranco Rosi, Werner Herzog, Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, Jay Rosenblatt, Claire Simon, Tia Lessin, Carl Deal and many, many more.

“We meet at a time when we are confronted daily by images of war, injustice, violence, and the genocide in Gaza,” Arrate Fernandez writes, “images that demand our empathy, confront us with the limits of what we can comprehend, even stretching our belief in humanity itself.”

Multiple films in the lineup address the war in Gaza that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, including Gaza’s Twins, Come Back to Me, directed by Mohammed Sawwaf, and The Clown of Gaza, directed by Abdulrahman Sabbah.

“They’re really made by people that live there, that come from this place and have been on the ground experiencing all these atrocities,” Arrate Fernandez tells Deadline. “In their storytelling and what the films end up being, they really go further than what we’ve seen in the news in the last two years… bringing the stories of people living there, of a mother, of a man trying to provide for his family through his job. And in that way, I think [they] also manage to create human bridges [by] focusing on exactly these human stories.”

Coexistence, My Ass!, directed by Amber Fares, “looks at what has been happening in the last two years [in Israel and Gaza] from a different perspective and bringing in the comedy elements,” Arrate Fernandez notes. The short documentary Return to al-Ma’in, from Forensic Architecture, examines what has become of a Palestinian village seized by Israeli militia in 1948.

Neither is IDFA ignoring the ongoing war in Ukraine, which is examined in Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Vitaly Mansky’s Time to the Target, and several other films in the program: Militantropos, directed by Alina Gorlova, Simon Mozgovyi, and Yelizaveta Smit, and Silent Flood, directed by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk.

“Militantropos and Silent Flood really bring in this case a different angle, a more in-depth view of and reflection of this war that has been going on now since 2022 or even before, because it started in 2014,” Arrate Fernandez says, “and take it a little bit beyond the immediate war casualties and war stories.”

IDFA, under the leadership of previous artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, spoke out forcefully against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has made concerted efforts to support the Ukrainian documentary filmmaking community through the IDFA Bertha Fund. That’s in line with its stated mission to be “a committed institution with a socially critical perspective.” But controversy has attended a decision by IDFA this year to bar Israeli state-backed organizations from attending the festival, citing what it considers the Israeli government’s human rights abuses. IDFA rejected accreditation requests from Israel’s DocAviv Festival, CoPro – The Israeli Content Marketing Foundation, and public broadcaster Kan, and has similarly banned state-back organizations from Russia and Iran.

“Many people think we are refusing filmmakers, film professionals, that we categorically boycott Israeli films or for that matter, other films. And that is not the case,” Arrate Fernandez insists. “We made a decision to not accredit these organizations, but we are open to [individual] filmmakers and film professionals from all over. We watched all the films that we received, the ones from Israel, but also the ones from Russia, also the ones from Iran or from what other country that at this moment is not really upholding human rights values. And we based our decision on watching these films and then looking into, if we were interested in selecting them, who’s funding these films.”

She added, “Looking back, [the decision] created some confusion. I am not sure this is something that we could have avoided.”

On its website, IDFA writes, “This week, several media outlets have falsely claimed that IDFA does not accept filmmakers or films from Israel. This is incorrect. IDFA does not exclude individual, independent filmmakers and film professionals—including those from Israel.”

The festival website also notes, “Recently, IDFA joined 713 organizations and 2,163 artists in signing the Dutch and Belgian cultural boycott against Israel. This boycott is in line with our existing guidelines: to exclude institutions financed by the Israeli government. This does not apply to all films, filmmakers, or other film professionals from Israel.”

This is Arrate Fernandez’s inaugural year as artistic director, but she has long been connected to the institution, serving for more than two decades as executive director of the IDFA Bertha Fund and leading IDFA’s filmmaker support department.

“I’ve been part of this organization for a long time in a different role,” she says, recalling memorable experiences from previous IDFAs. “I will never forget when [director] Victor Kossakovsky came running with the tape under his arm to screen Tishe! for the first time to an audience and I had to pick him up at the station to get him on time in the cinema because people were already sitting there… Having Victor coming back to premiere Trillion at the festival is very exciting as he’s been a regular of the festivals for so many years.”

Trillion premieres in the Envision competition alongside Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People; I Want Her Dead, directed by Gianluca Matarrese; Confessions of a Mole, directed by Mo Tan, Amílcar, directed by Miguel Eek, and other films.

“It’s such a varied selection,” Arrate Fernandez observes. “[With] Envision, I think one of the things the team truly enjoys is exactly exploring how filmmakers are working with documentary language in bringing across their stories but also playing with it and challenging us as viewers with what they make.”

Fordlândia Panacea also premieres in Envision, a documentary by Portuguese artist and filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias, who is IDFA’s Guest of Honor this year. The film explores a strange colonial scheme in the 20th century when automaker Henry Ford attempted to create a rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil.

De Sousa Dias “has really changed the way also other documentary filmmakers work with archive where she’s really dissecting and exploring, examining this archive more than using it as an image to tell a story, to illustrate a story,” Arrate Fernandez comments. “She’s really looking, examining the archive in a way also to expose what is not there or what has not been told or what is not being told by the people making this archive.”

Many films with Oscar aspirations are represented in the IDFA program, including The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki’s film about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5; Cover-Up, directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus; Julia Loktev with My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow; Cutting Through Rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni; Seeds, directed by Brittany Shyne; The Tale of Silyan, directed by Tamara Kotevska, Love+War, directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, as well as the aforementioned 2000 Meters to Andriivka; Coexistence, My Ass!, and other Academy Award contenders.

IDFA is well timed to aid filmmakers in the Oscar hunt, coming just a few weeks before the start of voting on the Oscar shortlists for documentary and short doc.

“With this role that IDFA has gotten in this race, it brings together different worlds in the gathering because with the internationalization of the documentary branch of the Academy, a big part of these members are not based in the U.S. and many of them do come to IDFA,” Arrate Fernandez says. “So here we have this crossing points where the U.S. side and the non-U.S. side can meet and engage. I think that’s very, very valuable also for the whole industry.”

Screening more than 250 films, including work in VR, IDFA brings together thousands of film professionals from around the world. While the program is set, there’s no telling what will develop on the ground – in meetings, at panel discussions, or as Arrate Fernandez puts it, “on the side… backstage.” There, interesting possibilities emerge “in terms of production contacts, who’s talking to who. New things and new collaborations can come out of that.”