IDFA’s Orwa Nyrabia Criticizes Documentary Distributors For “Populist” Mentality And Playing It Safe: “You Cannot All Live Off Taylor Swift”

deadline.com:

Documentary’s gatekeepers are playing it awfully safe lately, in the estimation of Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, the world’s largest documentary film festival.

In conversation with Deadline before the start of the 36th edition of the festival, Nyrabia assessed the landscape of nonfiction film, finding streaming platforms and other distributors inordinately risk averse.  “I think post pandemic especially, it seems like everybody in the distribution space is really striving to make up lost money,” he told Deadline. “And this is translating into really only betting on very, very clearly winning horses.

So, everybody is looking for films with preexisting IP. I mean, they don’t say so. But when I look at what it is that is really working [for them], it is all about celebrities who have their audience predefined, and when that’s not possible, then relying on preset formats such as serial killers and crime.

In a way this is about relying on the safest bets.” He observed, “To me, this is another phase of populism, even if these films were against populism politically, but they are populist as films.” Nyrabia said his goal for the festival is to present a lineup that’s “different in the sense that it is extremely fresh, and it is not what the market says it’s looking for.