With IDFA Forum underway and Europe’s leading documentary festival in full swing, Screen profiles some of the buzziest available titles, in various stages of production, from across the Forum and Festival. They include AI-scripted hybrid docs to profiles of Nazi propagandist Jan Teunissen and US singer Peaches, and portraits of lives in the Netherlands, South America, Lebanon, North Korea and beyond.
UK outfit Film Constellation has taken world rights on IDFA’s opening film and international competition entry About A Hero. Co-starring Vicky Krieps, this hybrid film is an adaptation of a script written by Kasper, an AI programme trained on Werner Herzog’s work.
Austria’s Autlook arrives in Amsterdam with its new title Neshoma, directed by Sandra Beerends and premiering in the Luminous section. Like the company’s award winning Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021), the film is produced by A Family Affair and again uses archive, this time to portray the Jewish community in Amsterdam before the war.
Amsterdam-based Film Harbour is beginning sales on its new Dutch title The Propagandist, about notorious Dutch filmmaker and Nazi collaborator Jan Teunissen. Directed by Luuk Bouwman, the film screens in international competition.
From Zurich, First Hand Films brings a slate led by competition title Writing Hawa, from director Najiba Noori, about an Afghan woman whose dreams of a better life are threatened after the Taliban comes back to power. The company is also beginning sales on Zara Arrehed’s Matriarchy (working title), about a young woman from an Orthodox Stockholm family having a secret affair with Muslim woman. The project is presented in Producers’ Connection at the Forum.
Dutch doc sales veteran Jan Rofekamp, founder of Films Transit, is consulting on competition title All Is Well, from Petra and Peter Lataster and producer Marty de Jong. This is an observational piece looking at the lives of elderly Ukrainian women who are now refugees in the Netherlands following Russia’s invasion of their homeland.
Lisbon-based sales outfit Utopia, which specialises in films from and about Latin America, is presenting The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine, a Chile/Netherlands coproduction screening in Best Of Fest, about one of the last gold diggers in Tierra del Fuego.
Canada’s Syndicado is introducing buyers to Andra Popescu’s new feature doc Bright Future, about the World Festival of Youth and Students held in North Korea in the late 1980s, which drew thousands of young socialists to Pyongyang for the celebrations.
Georg Gruber’s Berlin-based Magnet Films hasTeaches Of Peaches, a profile of artist, musician and feminist pop icon Peaches playing in Docs For Sale.
The feature documentary arm of French entertainment conglomerate Mediawan is handling An American Pastoral, Auberi Edler’s international competition entry. This verité film is set in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as school board elections reveal deep schisms in the community.
Krakow-based KFF Sales is introducing buyers to Three Chants, the latest feature from Polish auteur Krzysztof Nowicki, about three unlikely choristers trying to break a negative cycle in their lives through singing and community.
Fresh from world premiering the film at the European Parliament, Italy’s Nexo Studios brings Food For Profit, which looks at the untold stories behind the global food system, to Docs For Sale.
The new projects from Iran’s Eli Image include Ali Ehsani’s In Search Of The Lost Voice, about a young Iranian girl based in Toronto who travels to Iran to make a film about a female singer, only to discover that her subject is dead and there are no recordings of her voice because of the ban on women singing. The project is currently in development.
German outfit Pluto Film is in town with Mathijs Poppe’s The Jacket, an international premiere in the Luminous section. Produced through Elisa Heene’s company Mirage, the film follows Jamal Hindawi, a Palestinian living in Lebanon’s Shatila refugee camp and working on a play in which an old jacket stands as a symbol for Palestinian identity.
The UK’s Taskovski has taken world sales on Bosnian-born Dutch-based director Lidija Zelovic’s IDFA international competition entry Home Game, which explores the right wing drift of Dutch society from the perspective of someone who experienced the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The company also has Light Memories, the debut feature from Misha Vallejo Prut. Produced by Mayfe Ortega, this film about identity and family secrets premieres in competition.
Anais Clanet’s Paris-based Reservoir Docs is selling competition entry Green Is the New Red, from Anna Recalde Miranda, about the sinister and disturbing waves of violence against political activists and environmentalists in Latin America.
Roch Bozino’s French outfit Java Films is continuing sales on Norwegian cryptocurrency doc, Lie To Me, a Dutch premiere in Best Of Fests and directed by Bar Tyrmi.
Nascent France- Iceland- and Slovenia-based outfit Open Kitchen Films is attending IDFA for the first time with a slate headlined by Silent Observers. A world premiere in the Luminous section, this film is set in a Bulgarian mountain village where superstition runs rife — and where cats are considered vampires and donkeys are thought to be possessed.
Finally, Prague based Filmmotor is handling Lebanese filmmaker Raed Rafei’s documentary Tripoli /A Tale of Three Cities, a world premiere in the Luminous section.
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