Maybe, a film

On Sunday the 17th of November, I walked up to the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam with my friend, getting ready for a screening of No Other Land (2024) at this year’s IDFA. Just two days before, at the festival’s opening ceremony in the same venue, a lone protester called out the empty gestures of solidarity IDFA is performing towards the Palestinian struggle. “You continue to reduce Palestinian people to a mere piece of fruit”, the protester shouted at Orwa Nyrabia, IDFA’s artistic director, on the stage. Protesters were also present at the opening ceremony last year, denouncing the silent stance of the festival. Nyrabia’s applause in response to that protest would result in repercussions from Israeli filmmakers. The events made headlines around the world. There is no English language coverage of the protest at this year’s opening. Last year, the festival was criticized heavily for its lackluster response to the genocide. This year, the festival responded with headlining the Palestinian-Israeli documentary and including watermelons in their promotional materials.

IDFA’s promotional campaign, for which it invited artists Ehsan Fardjadniya and Raul Balai, describes itself as an open letter to the festival. Visually it comprises disparate elements on a picnic blanket, all generated by AI. The tableau includes a plate of watermelon and a dove covered in blood. In the short video that precedes every screening, the tableau is animated, and a voice-over proclaims: “I cannot refuse to be complicit. Can you?” This campaign was the first piece of information I encountered for this edition of the festival, and it immediately stirred much skepticism. If this is indicative of how IDFA is going to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza, with a plate of AI-generated watermelon in the corner of their festival magazine, then it is a terrible, terrible sign of things to come.

And so we sat down, up on the balconies, only a few rows away from where the protester stood mere days ago. The protester, someone I know from my university, was punched in the stomach by a prominent former TV journalist after making their statement. The very seat where it happened is occupied once again, and the grand room is packed, all sat in velvet seats under cascading chandeliers. Even before the film starts, a sense of dread seems to permeate the room. To watch a documentary that represents the coalescence of hours upon hours of footage capturing the violence the IDF and Israeli settlers inflict on Palestinian civilians in this grand room seems tasteless to say the least, morally reprehensible to be frank. But isn’t that the modus operandi of IDFA, and major film festivals in general? To be sitting in lavish halls, consuming both their overpriced Italian beers and the suffering of refugees on the silver screen. And yet there I was, in the very same room, because I wanted to support an urgent film. A film that has won countless audience awards, including at Berlinale (it also won Best Documentary film, despite the accusation of antisemitic sentiment by the Berlin senate) and IDFA. A ‘Hit’, according to the programming section in which IDFA had placed the film. Yet these do not feel like accomplishments, as Basel Adra describes in the talk after the screening. Adra, one of the four directors, is also the main focus of the film. A native of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the West Bank, he is an activist and journalist who relentlessly documents the senseless demolitions and arrests the IDF has made daily for years.

No Other Land, shot over five years from 2019 to 2023, captures Adra, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, and many others documenting the occupation of Israeli forces in Masafer Yatta. Adra’s phone is constantly buzzing, from neighbors alerting him that yet another convoy of military vehicles is entering their village with bulldozers. Carrying out a supposed lawful demolition of their home on the basis of “a lack of permit”. Permits that are impossible for Palestinians to obtain. Upon hearing the news, Adra would drive to the site, and film the demolition.

These demolitions occur over and over again, and every time Adra arrives at the scene to intimidate the workers, who are backed by IDF members holding assault rifles. “I am filming you!” Adra would decry. Often, this provokes the soldiers and settlers to pursue him. In one instance, a settler taunts Adra back, telling him to “go home and write your silly little articles”. Make your silly little film, the settler seems to announce, and see where that leads you. To the major festivals of Europe, it seemed to have led Adra.

The American filmmaker Laura Poitras, as a moderator alongside Nyrabia on stage, opened the Q&A with Adra and Abraham by stating that the camera is a tool of emancipation. “For a long time I believed in the camera,” Adra answered, “that when I carry the camera it would protect me. That if the people in the West see what’s happening in the West Bank, that somehow there will be change.” He sighs, and continues, “It’s getting harder and harder to believe that to be the case.” Later, when asked about the decision to make a documentary alongside their journalistic efforts, a detail in Abraham’s answer stuck out. Written journalism does not have the same reach to the global audience, he said. As much as social media is vital to spread awareness, both he and Adra were frustrated at the fruitlessness of their efforts. The countless TikToks and Instagram posts they made were not having the reach and impact that they hoped for. “Maybe, a film”, he said. Maybe that would be enough. My takeaway from that evening is that no film, no shockingly repulsive slice of reality would be enough to make an impact in that chandeliered hall. All possibility of emancipation is neutered by that room, by the giant IDFA banner projected onto the gold-trimmed walls. Struggle simply cannot co-exist with the institution.

Writing in 1991, Baudrillard declared that “the Gulf War did not happen”. The mass-televised coverage of the conflict dehumanized and abstracted the Iraqi forces to such a degree that the images of mass destruction became devoid of meaning. It is a dated claim, and his proclamation is not without contentions. Yet, in the thirty years since, the sentiment has been invoked countless times when discussing armed conflicts across the globe. I couldn’t help but recontextualize the claim in the hypermediated 2020s. Instagram acts as my main channel of information on what is happening in Gaza. Scrolling through my stories, my friends are sharing infographics on which relief funds one should donate to, which multinational corporation one should boycott, and when the next protest against the Dutch government’s complicity would be staged. For the last couple of years, I have lost all belief that social media can be a tool of emancipation. Writing after October 7th, Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza noted on his Instagram that “people share my stories and pictures, and the second post for them in their stories is them having fun. So, no need to share anything, and we don’t want your pity.” Images of atrocities are flattened on social media with photos of people’s brunch. The genocide in Gaza is at once hyper-visible and eerily absent. This tendency is even present at IDFA, where every screening is preceded with a fragment from No Other Land of bulldozers flattening a Palestinian home, bookended by clips from documentaries about John Lennon and Brian Eno. The consumption of the Other that IDFA encourages has never been more apparent to me than these moments of slippage. A representation of the complete lack of attention to the material implications of the images they are presenting. As much as it is important for the atrocities that are committed by the Israeli state to the people of Palestine to be widely disseminated, awareness alone is not enough to stop the genocide. Shame is not enough. Gaza might be the “most documented genocide in history” now, but if nothing changes, it won’t be for long.

Attending a screening of Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971) at the festival later that week, sneers can be heard towards the end. As the film flashes title cards carrying the message “Revolution = War”, the audience around me chuckled at it, as if gawking at the preposterousness of the statement. Festivals are not made for the careful spectator! As Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others: “to speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism”. The pedagogical images are rendered inept. Isn’t it the exemplary logic of late capitalism for radical voices to be co-opted into the mainstream? An open letter addressed to the festival, by the festival itself? Self-awareness absorbs no crimes, and certainly, we should not be satisfied with institutions acknowledging their shortcomings. Even when that awareness translates into action; have we learned nothing from the Tiny House project of last year’s Berlinale? Beyond calling for structural change, beyond overlooking IDFA’s usage of Palestinian iconography while including Israeli-backed films in their programming, we have to go beyond the capital F Festivals. Support your local protests and call for the divestment of your local government in the Israeli state. Watch documentaries and films about Palestine in community-organized screenings! Homogeny must be resisted, and the temptation of legitimacy be rejected!

Leaving the theater after No Other Land, my friend described the evening as a cruel endeavor. I find Adra and Abraham’s answers echoing in my head: Is the camera no longer a tool of emancipation? Do films still carry any power? Or have TikToks and Instagram reels neutralized any potential the big screen has? Maybe Nyrabia was correct when he opened his directorial statement with “Cinema cannot fix this!” ‘This’ seemingly encompasses all the ills and woes of our contemporary condition, of all the geopolitical conflicts and humanitarian crises, of ecological disaster. What can fix that?

 

Image credit: Royal Theater Carré, during IDFA 2024 (c) Theo Du

 

Op zoek naar het Palestijnse militante beeld

Reem Shilleh en Gawan Fagard zijn allebei toeschouwers, fysiek buiten Palestina, en allebei vatbaar voor een gevoel van machteloosheid dat zich opdringt via de aanhoudende informatie die vanuit het oorlogsgebied naar de veilige kant van de wereld stroomt. Overgeleverd aan het scherm, komt de pijn van de anderen akelig dichtbij.

The elephant in the tiny house

What to do when film festivals do not meet our expectations? Film critic Öykü Sofuoğlu questions to what extent film professionals can expect festivals like Berlinale to show political engagement through direct, concrete decisions and actions.

 

 

De spoken van Rotterdam

Een festival is een werk van liefde, maar het onderscheid maken tussen liefde en werk is moeilijk. Festivalprogrammator en -directeur María Palacios Cruz reflecteert over wat festivals (kunnen) zijn.

For Festival Purposes Only

Vanuit een reeks kijkervaringen vervuld met verveling en afleiding maakte Leon Decock een video-essay voor de Young Critics-workshop tijdens MOOOV. In een poging te ontsnappen uit de cinemazaal reconstrueert dit persoonlijk essay de kijkervaring, op zoek naar beelden die een uitweg bieden.

 

 

Elke stad een eigen Palais des Festivals

Hoe stellen we ons de toekomst van filmfestivals voor? Anders dan verleden en heden? Reizend door tijd en ruimte zoekt Dana Linssen hoe het verder kan, moet of had moeten gaan. Deze vragen voeden ook haar keynote op de Dag van het Filmberoep tijdens Film Fest Gent.