By Adam Nayman
I’m not sure what the small clutch of filmmakers, buyers, distributors and other assorted festival-goers with a hole in their early-morning schedules got out of Jan Rofekamp’s presentation at RIDM’s market. Armed with a laptop containing short clips from about a dozen recent documentaries, the Films Transit International honcho didn’t so much deconstruct the art of crafting an opening sequence for a non-fiction film—the ostensible point of his talk—as trumpet the quality of his company’s catalogue. When pressed on his points during the Q & A, he wasn’t much more enlightening. Asked about what he thought of the opening shot of Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufacturing Landscapes (2006)—surely one of the great curtain-raisers of the last decade—the Dutch sales agent responded that it was very long. He added that the director should have maybe prepared an alternate cut to appease impatient broadcasters: “Television is very fast.”
Having not attended any of the other market events at RIDM, I can’t say whether Rofekamp’s commitment to speedy commercial imperatives was the order of the day. Fortunately, the festival’s programming team, headed by Roxanne Sayegh and Charlotte Selb, has a little more faith in its audience—and in the virtues of slow(ish) cinema. While some of the films on display fell under the heading of slickly tooled crowd-pleasers—like Jon Foy’s well-travelled Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, a middling Unsolved Mysteries episode dragged out to 85 minutes—there also were a healthy number of titles that subverted expectations in terms of format, subject matter and duration. Or, as in the case of Xu Xin’s monumental Karamay, all three at once. It’s telling that this urgent and courageous piece of political cinema found a home at RIDM after being bypassed by Hot Docs.
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