At World’s Largest Documentary Festival, IDFA Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia Promises “Instant Classics… Some Really Brilliant Films”

deadline.com:

The 37th edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam is well underway, after opening with the world premiere of a film that might be called part nonfiction, part fiction, part real and part artificial.

About a Hero stars Werner Herzog, or an AI facsimile thereof, and uses a famous dictum of his as a starting point: the German filmmaker once famously remarked, “A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years.” Putting that to the test, director Piotr Winiewicz worked with machine learning engineers to task AI with writing a script based on Herzog’s body of cinematic work (Herzog permitted the venture).

The result is a story about a possible suicide or murder of a man in a German industrial town who worked at a firm developing a mysterious “infinity machine.” A supporting character has a passionate affair with a toaster (not sure what that says about Werner Herzog or the “mind” of AI).

About a Hero is one of a baker’s dozen of films in International Competition at IDFA, almost all of them world premieres. Overall, the festival will present 254 documentaries and 27 new media projects. “I think we have a brilliant program,” says IDFA Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia. “We have very strong competitions.