Amsterdam: Trams, cars, the threat of being mowed down by bicycles as you step out into the street and producers schmoozing their proposals to all and sundry – it could almost be Toronto, but the canals give it away – this is Amsterdam during the International Documentary Festival and Forum.

With the three other Ontario Film Development Corporation observers, Andrew Munger, Karen Shoposowitz and Megan Smith, I spent a week in Amsterdam taking in the European documentary scene.

The maple leaves on the screen and in attendance at the festival included Oliver Hockenhull with his documentary Aldous Huxley: The Gravity of Light, Kalli Paakspuu and Kevin Feng Ke with When East Meets East, Maureen Judge with Unveiled, and Angela Baldassarre on the critics jury, which awarded Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly the fipresci prize.

But the film festival is just the side show, the main attraction really being the three-day IDFA Documentary Forum in which producers were able to make a seven-minute pitch to a panel of commissioning editors (and their budgets).

‘A mixture of optimism and masochism’ was the comment from one producer – and we’re not talking about the Nick Broomfield documentary on fetishes here. The panel of commissioning editors came from all over Europe and around the world, including our own tvontario’s Rudy Buttignol and Discovery Canada’s John Panniker.

In an old church and one of Amsterdam’s leading nightclubs, the Paradiso, which shed its usual frenzied energy and transformed itself into a hushed and tense arena, observers and producers flanked commissioning editors as they heard from 60 chosen projects.

Moderating the seven-minute pitch and eight-minute feedback were Film Transit’s Jan Rofekamp, Discovery Europe’s Chris Haws, idfa organizers Jeanne Winkler and Fabrice Puchault, and the Danish Film Institute’s Karolina Lidin.

All the pitches were selected for the forum by idfa organizers, and each had to have support already from at least one source of finance. Canada’s entry this year – High Road Productions’ Wrestling with Shadows (previously known as Bret ‘Hit Man’ Hart), was pitched by Paul Jay and David Ostriker and supported by Buttignol (see High Road, p. 5).

Some ‘thumbs-up’ at the forum included Marriage Neapolitan Style from Italy’s Videa Documentary and rai, and Sean Now and Then, a feature looking at the ’60s legacy updated through a four-year-old child of the Haight-Ashbury heyday from Timed Exposures and Channel 4.

But the proposal that had commissioning editors clambering over the table to grab a piece of the action (especially tvo) was The Pink Triangle, the stories of gay survivors of the Holocaust by the team that produced The Celluloid Closet and Common Threads, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

How much of the interest raised at the forum translates into solid financing is questionable, as many of the countries represented make no bones of their moderate and diminishing budgets.

For the majority of proposals, the best the forum can generate is presale interest and feedback as to whether your project is a winner or a stinker. The latter certainly proved true for one Scandinavian company which proposed a film on the House of Wallenberg – famous for their power and their disdain for visibility, and therefore unlikely cooperative documentary subjects.

On a sweeter note, what many of the 150 or so observers hoped for was a chance to get picked out of the Moderator’s Hat – a lottery opportunity for a seven-minute squirm of optimism and masochism.

One Finnish company looking for top-up financing for its documentary on the ’60s plastic pod house, ‘the Futuro,’ made the draw, and it seemed that it might be a dream come true with interest from Le Sept/Arte and orf, and a possible presale to nps.

The forum proved to be an excellent place to dip one’s toes into the European marketplace, meet other producers and find out who did what, how, and why.

Jeannette Loakman is a Toronto-based freelance journalist and producer.