From 13 through 16 May, IDFA will be presenting a documentary program in the Dutch Culture Centre (DCC) in Shanghai, China. The DCC was opened on 6 March this year to accompany the World Expo in China. Ten documentaries previously seen at IDFA are included in the IDFA program. Director John Appel (The Player) and producer Carmen Cobos will give a master class on documentary making.
The IDFA program in the Dutch Culture Centre opens on 13 May with a master class by John Appel. This will be followed by a screening of Appel’s latest documentary,
The Player, winner of the inaugural IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary at the last IDFA. On Friday 14 May, the producer of the film, Carmen Cobos, will also give a master class. In addition to The Player, Cobos has produced documentaries for the likes of Peter and Petra Lataster-Czisch, Heddy Honigmann and Niek Koppen.
Other Dutch films that will be screened in the DCC include Ditteke Mensink’s
Farewell (2009);
Time Within Time (2009) by Menno Otten; winner of the NPS IDFA Award for Mid-Length Documentary 2008
Boris Ryzhy (2008) by Aliona van der Horst, and
The Underground Orchestra (1997) by Heddy Honigmann.
View the
complete IDFA program in the DCC.
Alongside the DCC, IDFA organizes another two programs in China in the months ahead. At the beginning of June, IDFA will present a program of recent award-winning documentaries at the
MIDA documentary festival, the biggest documentary festival in Asia which takes place from 7 through 10 June in Shanghai.
Subsequently, a selection of the films shown at the DCC and MIDA will be screened in Beijing, in the
Ullens Centre for Contemporary Arts (UCCA) in the trendy artists’ quarter, district 789.
Dutch Culture Centre
The
Dutch Culture Centre will host a cultural program developed for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science to accompany the
World Expo in China. In close cooperation with leading Dutch bodies and their Chinese counterparts, the Dutch Culture Centre has drawn up a diverse program of exhibitions, performances and master classes.
On 6 March, the DCC will open in the Jing’ An district of downtown Shanghai. For six months, the DCC will be a welcome addition to ‘Happy Street’, the
Dutch pavilion designed by architect John Körmeling on the site of the World Expo. The Dutch Culture Centre will be located in a recently renovated former factory complex from the 1940s, which now bears the name ‘800 Show’.
China themed program on IDFA TV
In May, IDFA’s online documentary channel,
IDFA TV, will also be focusing on China, presenting some ten recent documentaries from and about China. These will include Travels by Tricycle by Wang Dongdong (China 2004); Feet Unbound (Australia, 2006) by Khee-Jin Ng and Jade Green Station (China, 2004), available to view online for free. The films in this themed program are about the rapid changes currently taking place in Chinese society. Jade Green Station, for example, is about a small village that becomes a lively meeting place following the laying of a railway line.
Jan Vrijman Fund in China
IDFA is also striving to stimulate the production of creative documentaries in other ways. Last year, the
Jan Vrijman Fund – which supports documentary projects in developing countries – twice allocated finance to documentary film festivals in China.
One of these projects is iDOCS International Documentary Forum, which will take place in Beijing in December 2010. The subsidy request for the leading independent film festival Documentary Film Festival China, also located in Beijing, was granted during the last selection round, this February.