I've been going to IDFA since 2011, first as a visitor, then as a programmer, now as an archiver. The shorts programme has always been the part of the festival I trust most — it's where the work that doesn't fit anywhere else tends to land. Eleven films this year earned a second watch. These are notes on those eleven, written a few days after seeing them, before the impressions flattened into opinions.
The Cartographer's Daughter (dir. Aiko Suzuki, NL/JP, 18 min)
Suzuki's best film yet, and one of the clearest examples I've seen of what the personal documentary can do that journalism can't. Her grandmother mapped the coastline of a small island in western Japan in the 1960s and was never credited for it. The film is about that absence — in the archive, in the family memory, in the official record. Suzuki doesn't make it into a polemic. She just looks, very carefully, at what's not there. By the end you understand what the absence cost.
Already in the archive. Find it here.
Silt (dir. Mourad Benali, DZ/FR, 24 min)
Algerian filmmaker working in France, second short film. Shot almost entirely underwater in a river delta in the south of France, tracking the movement of sediment as the tide turns. No voiceover, no music, minimal editing. It sounds like it should be boring. It isn't. There's something about the scale of time it implies — the sediment has been moving like this for ten thousand years and will continue moving like this after the camera is gone — that gradually shifts your attention from what you're looking at to what you're feeling about what you're looking at.
Seven Hundred Metres (dir. Ngo Thi Huong, VN, 31 min)
A documentary about a woman who has walked the same seven-hundred-metre route between her house and the market every day for forty years. The film accompanies her on twelve of these walks across four seasons. The repetition is the point — what changes, what doesn't, what she notices, what she's stopped noticing. The longest film on this list and the one I thought about the most in the days after.
Interval (dir. Song Yejin, KR, 17 min)
A Korean fiction film built around a single sound: the interval between a door closing and the next sound in an apartment. Song uses this interval as a kind of structural unit, repeating and varying it across the film. It sounds formally cold but plays emotionally — by the third or fourth repetition you're waiting for the sound the way a character in a thriller waits for a footstep.
Notes on Three Photographs (dir. Clara Rist, CH, 14 min)
Swiss filmmaker, first film. Three photographs taken by her great-uncle in Lebanon in 1982, shown for the first time and examined in detail. The film raises questions about what it means to look at images made in a context of violence and never distributed, found in a shoebox after the photographer's death. Very controlled, very precise. One of the films I'd most like to see what Rist does next.
Before the Rain (dir. Aleksandra Niemczyk, PL, 22 min)
A fiction film set in a single afternoon in a small Polish town before a storm that everyone knows is coming. The film uses the waiting as its entire subject — the pause before something happens, and all the small decisions and non-decisions people make inside that pause. Niemczyk is working with material that would easily become portentous but doesn't. It stays completely ordinary, and that's what makes it work.
The remaining five films — A Country I Can No Longer Find (Farrukh Tashkentov), Tidal (Hana Yılmaz), The Weight of Salt (Dayo Okonkwo), Meridian (Paulo Salave'a), and Groundwork (Kim Jinhee) — are annotated in the archive for members. Each one earned its place on this list for different reasons, and the notes try to explain why.