A scene from Mads Brugger’s The Ambassador, which views corruption in Africa through the eyes of an opportunistic businessman. Courtesy Johan Stahl Winthereik
A scene from Mads Brugger’s The Ambassador, which views corruption in Africa through the eyes of an opportunistic businessman. Courtesy Johan Stahl Winthereik

International Documentary Festival Amsterdam highlights



The sheer range of films at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam ensure that, if not the largest, it is the most closely watched documentary festival in the world. Documentaries from the 12-day festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, will go on to be shown at festivals and in cinemas throughout the coming year, while the same films will be broadcast on television.

The offerings in Amsterdam this past week extended in multiple directions, from a Palestinian do-it-yourself doc, 5 Broken Cameras, a cinematic evocation of everyday clashes under occupation, to Bad Weather, a meditation on the ways that worsening floods in Bangladesh shape the natural and human landscapes.

The festival's top prize for a feature documentary went to Planet of Snail, a poignant film from the South Korean director Seung-jun Yi, about a deaf and blind young man's relation to the world around him. Tall and lithe, Young-chan writes poetry and makes sculptures of figures and flowers that reveal his tactile refinement and a gentle sense of humour. Guiding him through what would be the most ordinary of tasks for an able-bodied person is an eternally patient girlfriend of half his height, Soon-ho, who is also disabled. They are an odd, but loving, couple.

Set mostly in ordinary interiors, Planet of Snail unfolds with a quiet rhythm and a tender visual elegance as it explores the space between what the camera can observe clearly, and what Young-chan can sense with his companion's help.

If tactility becomes language in Planet of Snail, the blunt assaults by Israeli soldiers on fragile video cameras create the visual texture of 5 Broken Cameras, by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, which received a special jury prize at IDFA.

Emad Burnat became a filmmaker by accident. He lives in the village of Bil'in, on the West Bank, west of Ramallah. When Israeli soldiers seize land nearby and build a wall to cordon off Palestinian villagers from a Jewish settlement, Emad and his neighbours take to the streets. Emad's camera documents the encroachment on their land and the villagers' protests against it. Time and again, the unarmed Palestinians throw stones, and the Israelis respond with tear gas, and later with live ammunition. No camera lasts for more than a year in the demonstrations.

The film 5 Broken Cameras gets as close as is physically possible to one village's reality of life under occupation. For the film to be observed at that range, the camera itself becomes a casualty. It took five of them to shoot this documentary, which also records the toll on human lives over five years. Burnat's son, Jibreel, is born after he gets his first camera. The film lurches between rare quiet moments in the family home and confrontations with soldiers outside, which is the only outdoor environment that the children know.

The documentary is sure to travel widely, as will The Ambassador, IDFA's opening-night film by Mads Brugger of Denmark, which views corruption in Africa through the eyes of an opportunistic businessman (a character created by Brugger) who buys an ambassadorship. Brugger, a television satirist in Copenhagen, buys the title of Liberian ambassador to the Central African Republic. He then manoeuvres to open a factory to manufacture matches in Bangui, the troubled capital, while positioning the business as a front for the diamond trade.

The Ambassador is high satire with the poker-faced Brugger filling hand after outstretched hand with bribes in a labyrinth of crooked deals that he says are needed to accomplish anything. He's far from the only European buying influence. The Central African Republic is often called "a failed state", he tells us in a deadpan narrative, "but that assumes that it can be considered a state". What everyone knows for certain is that the country is rich in minerals. The tale of one man in the stampede for its riches gets a laugh in almost every frame. The flip-side of this odd story is despair in the face of rampant corruption.

Brugger takes the first-person documentary into satire, in the style of Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Bruno), with the filmmaker/narrator not only telling the story, but inserting fictitious elements - inventing the character who tells it and shaping a madcap script.

The first-person doc-narrative also explores new territory in Unraveled, an extended talk with the American lawyer/embezzler Marc Dreier that was filmed before he went into federal prison in the US in 2009 after confessing to defrauding clients of hundreds of millions of dollars. Sometimes the brazen lawyer impersonated those clients, including a billionaire Manhattan real estate mogul. He also tried to rob pension funds.

Among the recent documentaries and feature films that address the US financial collapse, Unraveled got unprecedented access to a confessed criminal. The director Marc Simon, a former lawyer in Dreier's firm, conducts interviews with his former boss in a high-rise Manhattan apartment where Dreier waits under house arrest for his sentencing. With remarkable parallels to the recent comedy Tower Heist (produced long after the Dreier crimes), the film follows Dreier's account of his own spectacular misdeeds as his lawyer and young son go in and out of the conversation.

Dreier's admission of guilt comes in a seemingly heartfelt letter to the court, which we witness him drafting. It earns him a reduced sentence of 20 years, of which he will have to serve at least 17. Yet the film stops short of being a confession. Even when Dreier is faced with the certainty of prison time, he minimises the seriousness of his crimes and wonders whether he should have fled the US. The audience exits wondering how much this man has really learnt.

Midway through the festival, IDFA's prize for a music documentary went to Last Days Here, a portrait of the notorious drug-addicted heavy metal singer Bobby Liebling, whose band Pentagram were hugely influential among hard-core metalheads.

The film by Don Argott is unflinching in its observation of the 50-ish Liebling, incapacitated by crack and living off his parents. Liebling's father, a retired US defence department official, is as helpless as anyone to reverse his son's downwards spiral. Yet the rocker still has devoted fans, who help him stage a miraculous comeback. Will it last?

For the director of the oddly elegiac Paul Williams Still Alive, Stephen Kessler, it's a sweet surprise that his 1970s boyhood hero, the diminutive blond songwriter, is still living after years outside the limelight. Kessler's bittersweet documentary which, like Last Days Here, should have a long afterlife on television, follows Williams stumbling through the aftermath of fame, with a wry commentary from Williams himself on celebrity.

Name: Brendalle Belaza

From: Crossing Rubber, Philippines

Arrived in the UAE: 2007

Favourite place in Abu Dhabi: NYUAD campus

Favourite photography style: Street photography

Favourite book: Harry Potter

THE BIO

Family: I have three siblings, one older brother (age 25) and two younger sisters, 20 and 13 

Favourite book: Asking for my favourite book has to be one of the hardest questions. However a current favourite would be Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier

Favourite place to travel to: Any walkable city. I also love nature and wildlife 

What do you love eating or cooking: I’m constantly in the kitchen. Ever since I changed the way I eat I enjoy choosing and creating what goes into my body. However, nothing can top home cooked food from my parents. 

Favorite place to go in the UAE: A quiet beach.

COMPANY%20PROFILE
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ECompany%20name%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Co%20Chocolat%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202017%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EFounders%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Iman%20and%20Luchie%20Suguitan%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Dubai%2C%20UAE%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EIndustry%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Food%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EFunding%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20%241%20million-plus%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestors%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Fahad%20bin%20Juma%2C%20self-funding%2C%20family%20and%20friends%3C%2Fp%3E%0A

Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

The smuggler

Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple. 
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.

Khouli conviction

Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.

For sale

A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.

- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico

- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000

- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950

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