Headshot Susana de Sousa Dias

Source: Courtesy of IDFA

Susana de Sousa Dias

Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias will be the guest of honour at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), taking place from November 13–23.

It marks the first edition under new artistic director Isabel Arrate Fernandez.

IDFA will have a full retrospective of Sousa Dias’s work including the world premiere of her latest feature Fordlândia Panacea, about the company town founded by US industrialist Henry Ford deep in the Amazon rainforest in 1928.

The project was created by Kintop, the Lisbon-based production company Sousa Dias runs with Ansgar Schaefer, her partner and producer. It follows on from the director’s earlier short doc on the same subject, Fordlandia Malaise, which screened in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded in 2019.

Sousa Dias is a curator and academic as well as a filmmaker, specialising in archive-driven work. IDFA will be showing her key works including Still Life (2005), an archival meditation on the Portuguese fascist regime Estado Novo, Europe’s longest running dictatorship, and 48 (2009), in which she turned her gaze on the Salazar rera by focusing on photographs of political prisoners - and accompanying their images with recordings of men and women talking about the period.

Alongside the retrospective of Sousa Dias’s own documentaries will be a top 10 of titles chosen by the director herself. Among the films she has chosen are Monangambééé (1968) by Sarah Maldoror, and Images of the World And The Inscription Of War (1989) by Harun Farocki.

Sousa Dias combines her filmmaking with teaching in the fine art faculty at the University of Lisbon. She has also served as co-director of film festival, Doclisboa, During her time in Amsterdam, she will be giving a centrepiece talk. 

IDFA has also confirmed the first details of the Dead Angle sidebar, that will look at how documentary has examined the inner workings of institutions. Among the titles screening are Fred Wiseman’s State Legislature (2006),an observational portrait of the Idaho Legislature, and How To Build a Library (2025) by Maia Lekow and Christopher King, that follows the renovation of a colonial- era library in Nairobi.

How To Build A Library is sold by Autlook and premiered in Sundance.

Also screening in the sidebar is Malek Bensmaïl’s 2015 film Checks And Balances, that follows journalists at Algeria’s El Watan newspaper as they campaign for press freedom. 

Additionally, ‘Off The Internet’ has been confirmed as the theme of IDFA’s new media programme, IDFA DocLab. The programme will explore the growing craving of many to disconnect from the online world. Among the immersive and physical works receiving their premieres at DocLab are Nothing to See Here by Celine Daemen, and Handle with Care by Ontroerend Goed, presented in collaboration with de Brakke Grond.

The final competition titles and full IDFA programme will be announced on October 14.

 

 

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