Séamas McSwiney looks over the major gathering for European documentary-makers, including IDFA in Amsterdam and Suny Side of Doc in Marseilles.

It's no longer a secret. Documentary is the new black. The broad interest that has always existed for good fact films has been highlighted by a regular stream of high profile successes that began to flow several years ago. There are many reasons for this, ranging for a desire for more intelligent entertainment as an antidote to the proliferation junk television, but also frustration at the power of spin and the corporate domination of news gathering. Documentaries go to places mainstream media fear to tread. The two big professional meets of the doc world every year are the Amsterdam IDFA and Sunny Side of the Doc in Marseille.

The big one
The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam takes place in November and combines a week of documentary films on 10 screens with events involving the artistocrats of documentary (like Albert Maysles, Ricky Leacock and Fred Wiseman) on the one hand, and the professional blood sport that is the pitching sessions on the other. For this latter event, filmmakers not only volunteer, but also pay good money to be thrown to the lions in an event which is appropriately called the Forum. The lions in question are the much-solicited commissioning editors, guardians of their TV channel's budget. TV money is pretty much the lifeblood of documentary filmmaking, and here the filmmakers risk their reputations in full view of their competing peers in the hope of collecting slices of their budget from several countries in one fell swoop. It's like a cross between speed-dating and a gang bang.

In Amsterdam when you're at one event, you're missing two others. It takes place in the wind and rain of November, in the city centre streets of a buzzing cosmopolitan city of many reputations, and involves a cast of tens of thousands.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 104.