from idfa

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has just opened at Pathé Tuschinski with Stand van de sterren (Position of the Stars) by Leonard Retel Helmrich. Before the opening, the winner of the 2010 Dutch Cultural Media Fund Documentary Award was announced by the fund’s chair Jacob Kohnstamm. The prize of € 125,000 was awarded to Barbara Visser for the realization of her plan for the film C.K.

The prize of € 125,000, provided by the Dutch Cultural Media Fund , which exists to stimulate cultural media production in the Netherlands, is awarded for the realization of the best film plan developed at the IDFA Documentary Workshop. The workshop is funded and co-organized by the Cultural Media Fund. This year sees the 20th anniversary of the collaboration between IDFA and the Dutch Cultural Media Fund.

C.K. concerns an accountant for a large art fund who suddenly disappears from the face of the earth along with his family and millions of euros of public money. Bewildered, the people he leaves behind do everything they can to reconstruct his secret lives: the facts, interpretations and speculations are different for each of them, producing hugely divergent perspectives on C.K. and what he did.

Barbara Visser (Haarlem, 1966) studied photography and audiovisual media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her work is exhibited internationally in museums and appeared at the São Paulo and Venice biennials. Visser also lectures at the Masters courses at Eindhoven Design Academy and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

The jury, comprising Marjoleine Boonstra, Aage Hollander, Robert Oey, Babeth Vanloo and Barbara Wiessing, selected the winning film plan from the eight developed under the guidance of documentary maker Coco Schrijber. The jury report describes the winning plan as, ‘A film that might be a thriller or a fairytale, about a man who fools everyone, including perhaps himself, by taking millions that don’t belong to him and starting a new life himself – leaving us all behind, dumbfounded.’

A commission including representatives of the public broadcasting companies selected workshop participants on the basis of synopses they submitted. One of the public broadcasters will broadcast the winning documentary.