IDFA-films in Dutch cinemas

The young Palestinian activist Basel Adra lives in Masafer Yatta, a centuries-old network of Bedouin villages in the West Bank. His community is the target of an aggressive Israeli eviction campaign, supposedly to make way for a military base. During the day, bulldozers flatten villages, at night desperate residents rebuild their homes.

Working with the Jewish-Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and two co-directors, Adra started a film collective. From the summer of 2019, they turned their cameras on the soldiers. The jerky hand-held images emphasize how precarious the situation is. Everyday scenes show a friendship blossoming between the two activists. Using old home videos and a voice-over, Adra explains that the oppression afflicting his community has been going on much longer.

Although the documentary was finished in October 2023, the directors end with disturbing images of Masafer Yatta in wartime. It makes this urgent film—awarded the Berlinale Best Documentary Prize and winner of many audience awards—both a history lesson and a tragic prologue.

Neshoma is the Yiddish-Hebrew word for soul or spirit. In Sandra Beerends’ new film, this refers to the soul of pre-war Jewish Amsterdam.

Numerous excerpts from archive footage and films are connected by the fictional character of Rusha, a Jewish Everywoman from the interbellum, constructed from testimonies of contemporaries and survivors of the Holocaust. In letters, she tells her brother Max, who has left for the Dutch East Indies, about her life, her mishpoche (family) and her city. She also plays correspondence chess with him.

Starting from 1918 at the end of the “Great War”, in which the Netherlands remained neutral, Neshoma shows the developments and changes in a compelling and moving montage. From the colorful life of the Jewish quarter, where Rusha’s father is a diamond cutter, to social struggle and the modern building projects of the Jewish alderman Rodrigues de Miranda; from the opening of the Tuschinski theater on the Reguliersbreestraat, to the fire that reduced the huge Paleis voor Volksvlijt exhibition building to ashes; from the Depression years and the rise of National Socialism, to the persecution of Jews during the occupation.

After acclaimed essays such as dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009), Johan Grimonprez now unravels the decolonization of the Congo. He succinctly sets out the international context of the Cold War, the American civil rights movement and the Non-Aligned Movement in the UN, before zooming in on the murder of Congo’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961 and the direct involvement of the Belgian and US governments, which feared losing their grip on Congolese uranium.

Grimonprez spices this pressure cooker of colonialism, capitalism and racism with jazz. “Jazz ambassador” Louis Armstrong was sent to Congo by the US as a smokescreen for overthrowing Lumumba’s government, while musicians such as Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed the UN Security Council to protest Lumumba’s murder.

Meanwhile Armstrong and other jazz ambassadors face a painful dilemma: How to represent a country where racial segregation is still the law of the land? Music propels this jazzily edited documentary, which won the Special Jury Award at Sundance, into the present in which Congo still suffers from the neo-colonial battle over resources.

In 1892, hundreds of art objects from the West African kingdom of Dahomey were looted by French colonial troops and taken to the “mother country”. In 2021, 26 of these displaced royal artifacts were returned to the Republic of Benin, within which Dahomey had been located. It was a key moment in the troubled post-colonial timeline.

In this hybrid documentary, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop—who won a Golden Bear for this film—imaginatively builds a bridge between past, present and future. The meticulous transportation of the wooden statue of Dahomey’s former ruler King Ghezo is recorded without comment, but the filmmaker does give a voice to the king himself, who reflects on his return in a poetic and enchanting voice-over.

A debate among students from the University of Abomey-Calavi brings the documentary back to present-day reality. Their gaze is fixed on the future, as they discuss their country’s museum policy, and how future generations throughout society can be reunited with the art of their ancestors.

The last occupant of Cumnor Place in Oxford has recently died. Her four adult children come together at the parental home to clear out the house in preparation for selling it. It’s filled to the rafters with scientific and esoteric memorabilia, antique furniture, stacks of documents and family pictures. Every corner breathes the history of this eccentric family, in which the mother, an ambitious scientist, ruled the roost, and the father—a dragon fanatic—provided idiosyncratic stories.

The heirs encounter dragons everywhere they go in this enchanting observational documentary—in paintings and on plates, on notebooks filled with invented “scientific” terminology, in the Beowulf epic, and in family myths about ponds filled with dragons’ blood.

The film follows the Impey family over a period of time, in increasingly emptier rooms filled with a magical soundscape of gusting wind, squeaks and creaks. Each object that passes through the family’s hands unleashes bittersweet tales from an unorthodox youth that brimmed with fabulous adventures, complex family relationships, isolation, and deep-seated fears.

In the late 1960s, photographer Ernest Cole’s disturbing photobook House of Bondage gave an insider’s perspective on apartheid and its impact on Black South Africans like himself. It shocked the world. In the 1980s Cole fell into oblivion, however, partly because his photographic negatives appeared to have been lost. But in 2017 many of them were rediscovered.

Director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) looks back on Cole’s work and life through the photographer’s lens. The voice-over is based on texts written by Cole, who died in poverty, but the starring role is reserved for his phenomenal photography.

While living in exile in the United States he continued to photograph Black communities in urban and rural areas. Potential clients sadly didn’t recognize the urgency of his work; his observations of increasing similarities between racism in the US and South Africa was clearly an unwelcome message.

Cole’s observations have only gained in value with time. Euphoria about the freedom he anticipated in the US gave way to disappointment and homesickness. Ernest Cole, Lost and Found won the L’Oeil d’or for best documentary at Cannes.