From the 300 films in the 25th International Documentary Film festival i Amsterdam I have selected to watch six films in the first days of the festival. For the first tim since retiring I could select films during daytime, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. It was also nice that for most of them I saw the premiere that came with a Question and Answer session with directors and sometimes lead actors. Most impressive for me? Are you listening, a film on a family struggling to survive after their village was washed away by a cyclone in coast Bangladesh.
It was the opening film of the DOK Leipzig Internationl Competition in Leipzig 2012. At IDFA Kara Ahmad Simon (writer and director) and Sara Afreen (producer) answered questions. It took them 18 months in dire circumstances to show the Hindu family’s life living on the one dike that was still there after the cyclone. At the end the villagers themselves took the initiate to build another dike with local materials and little outside support that should hopefully guard them against the next cyclone in the Gulf of Bengal.