Idfa Docs for Sale
Many visitors to the festival in Amsterdam (November 17-28) are there to look for films to buy for their national television channels. The buyers sit in their booths and choose among more than 500 films, as do festival representatives from all over the world. For the buyers the work is mostly of a pre-selection nature where the films are watched for maybe 10 minutes and then a decision is taken to ask for a dvd screener to take home for final decision, or to state ”not interested”.
The Docs for Sale, that also includes an online service during the whole year – good for those who do not travel to idfa – and for those of us who can not see the films when at idfa because of meetings and attendance of the Forum (see below) – has a hit list of the most watched films. Again a pleasure to see on the top 10 that Latvian ”Family Instinct” has been watched 59 times and that Serbian ”Cinema Komunisto” (PHOTO) and Danish ”Blood in the Mobile” have 57 screenings.
Number 1 – well tv buyers, like the rest of us, like food made with a high artistic quality and a film about ”El Bulli” is of course not to be missed. The film, watched 86 times, is directed by German director Gereon Wetzel and lasts 108 minutes, and this is the catalogue description:
The chefs at the world-renowned, Michelin-starred Spanish restaurant El Bulli have turned cooking into an art form. The doors are only open to the public for six months of the year; the rest of the time, a select team of experts is hard at work creating a new avant-garde 30-course menu. Looking on from the sidelines, we watch experiments with structure, sound, color and – finally – flavor. Cooking with liquid nitrogen, something the restaurant is particularly famous for, is but one of the many unconventional preparation methods used here. Owner Ferran Adrià is always on hand, tasting everything created in this flavor lab and coming across like a softened-down version of Gordon Ramsey. We discover that experimental dishes such as Parmesan Crystal and Vanishing Ravioli came about largely by chance. When one of the chefs fished out an ice cube from his Coke glass and dropped it in the gravy on his plate, he thought, why not make a dish from ice cubes? And why not mix oil with water, for a cocktail that leaves a deliciously soft coating on the lips? At El Bulli, it’s all about feeling something, experiencing something. In the words of top chef Adrià, “The more bewilderment, the better.”
