IDFA – International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2011

In Nov. 2011, Cesare Wright attended the Industry Forum at IDFA as the representative for the Kino-Eye Center. The annual event is the premier international documentary film festival and professional media forum.  In addition to an impressive range of internationally produced documentary films, IDFA hosts a series of industry discussion panels and workshops, and brings together film professionals from all over the world.

In 2008, the Kino-Eye Center featured a review of the award winning documentary film Rise Up (2007) by director Luciano Blotta.  The film has now been included as part of the curriculum in several university courses, and will be featured in the Advanced Sound and Cinematography course at Rice Univ. in Spring 2012.

This year, we would like to highlight the outstanding film Kumare (2011, Dir. Vikram Gandhi), which Cesare Wright will review in an upcoming article that discusses “ecstatic truth” and the sublime encounter in the works of Werner Herzog. According to Wright, Kumare presents a compelling case for the “truth” value of stylization and strategic manipulation in cinema:

In the works of Herzog, identity crisis manifests through the experience of the filmic character, where the (often fictive) construct of the filmic subject arguably serves as a subjective expression of Herzog’s own artistic formulation of identity. Whereas Herzog vicariously explores identity crisis through one filmic character after another (Aguirre, Dieter, Treadwell, Steiner, etc.), Vikram Gandhi engages more explicitly in a directly personal cinematic encounter with identity, by dually situating himself as both director and subject. “Kumare” serves not only as a filmic character, but also as a fictive mode through which Gandhi explores an idealized version of the Dasein – the phenomenological expression of distinct subjective identity. Moreover, through the cinematic “fabrication and imagination and stylization” that is “Kumare”, Gandhi invites the audience and the other filmic characters to participate in this journey of identity (re)formulation.