VERTIGO & AMATEUR FOOTAGE

IDFA Film Festival - notes...

Private Footage (dir. Janaína Nagata) – Brazil. This is an investigative film: the author decodes an amateur film novella frame by frame, transforming the action into the genre of desktop-documentary. And with Godard-type passion converts movie making into politics. Award for Best Audiovisual Achievement at IDFA.

The film begins as a typical detective story usually begins - Janaína buys a certain item in an antique shop, which turns out to be 16mm film reel. It looks as if it was filmed as early as 1970s. So let’s see what are the shadows emerging from the old film? The family of the architect Heinrich Vervoerd spends their holidays in South Africa. Safari, rickshaws, Bantu women dancing for travelers, picnic by the pool. Everything looks innocent - the holidays of wealthy Europeans in another part of the world.

But the director is leading to an exposure. Without the budget to travel to South Africa and research the archives, she dives into the Internet and searches for the historical "behind the scenes" of a carefree vacation – trying to find out what was happening outside of these sybarite shots. And she finds, of course, apartheid; and some of the respectable gentlemen smiling on the screen are war criminals. Gradually, the narration turns into a split screen: the director consistently examines every centimeter of amateur shots, finding more and more tragic absurdities. It makes a viewer dizzy. Remember Hitchcock's Vertigo...