The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has announced Dutch/Iranian director Niki Padidar’s All You See as its opening film and has unveiled the main competition titles for this year’s event, which runs from November 9-20.
Newly unveiled selections include the Envision and International Competitions and the entire IDFA DocLab program. The festival’s official selection comprises 277 titles in total.
Opening film All You See is billed as a multi-layered feature that includes honest, painful, and even humorous encounters with three other immigrants to the Netherlands, interwoven between director Niki Padidar’s own personal history.
International Competition
The International Competition has 13 documentaries, including Mila Turajlić’s Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, which explores never-before-seen footage of Yugoslav leader Tito’s cameraman documenting his trips to Africa and Asia to promote a third way amidst the Cold War.
Paradise by Alexander Abaturov documents a raging forest fire in northeastern Siberia, brought on by climate change, as villagers come together to subdue the inferno.
Silent House by Farnaz Jurabchian and Mohammadreza Jurabchian tells the story of three generations of an Iranian family, from the 1979 Islamic Revolution to today, who grapple with history in a hundred-year-old house.
Petra and Peter Lataster’s Journey Through Our World affectionately looks at their shrunken world in lockdown.
Apolonia, Apolonia by Lea Glob tenderly evokes a 13-year friendship between the filmmaker and a magnetic young painter as they navigate growing up in a world of life, death, and art.
Envision Competition
The Envision Competition comprises 12 films, and is billed as a section where “visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages.”
In My Lost Country, filmmaker Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez uses family keepsakes to construct a loving portrait of her exiled theatre director father Mohsen Sadoon Yasin, and an elegy to their lost homeland of Iraq. Invoked by Luka Papić and Srđa Vučo looks back at the landmark free elections in Serbia in 1990, reimagining through montage how history might have otherwise unfolded.
Scenes With My Father, the directorial debut from Biserka Šuran, enters an abandoned factory-turned-theatre to journey through family history while interrogating the construct of Europe. Ignacio Agüero’s Notes on a Film uses re-enactment and archival footage to shed light on Chile colonization as explored through the 1889 memoirs of a Belgian settler.
In Raw Session, Brazilian trans/non-binary collective As Talavistas and ela.ltda delivers a self-portrait. Meanwhile, in Notes on Displacement, filmmaker and visual artist Khaled Jarrar joins forces with a refugee family, accompanying them in their journey from Syria to Germany.
Elsewhere, the 12-title Immersive Competition showcases immersive docs including Darren Emerson’s multisensory VR installation In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, presented in collaboration with Amsterdam Dance Event and the London Film Festival, uncovers the birth of rave culture in the UK.
With 10 selected titles, the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling has interactive storytelling from both established names and newcomers.
AI-driven storytelling can be seen in Bieke and Dries Depoorter’s Border Birds, a poetic imaging project that follows the flight of birds across heavily policed borders via hacked webcams. Ghana Airways by Hakeem Adam is a three-part audio work that asks what it means to be Ghanaian in the 21st century.
With 10 selected titles, the non-competitive DocLab section brings VR projects, immersive theatre, and an expanded offering of fulldome projects. Among them are Partita for 8 Voices by Michel Lam, a collaboration between the arts of song and graphic animation; A Radical Compromise by Daniel Červenka, a 360-degree immersion into a Czech brown coal mine; and Grandma’s House by David Gardener, a portrayal of careening into dementia.
IDFA artistic director Orwa Nyrabia said: “Here’s an eclectic lineup that is united only by originality. Through the subjectivities of these filmmakers, an image of a world in pain emerges—a humanity that is trying hard, that is vulnerable and sincere, that is complex and persistent. The diversity of artistic forms is astonishing, and there are no boundaries when it comes to tackling the biggest powers or inventing new grammar.”
International Competition
Apolonia, Apolonia, Dir. Lea Glob (Den/Pol/Fr), World Premiere
Colette and Justin, Dir. Alain Kassanda (Fr/Bel), World Premiere
Dreaming Arizona, Dir. Jon Bang Carlsen (Den/Est/Nor), World Premiere
Girl Who Dreams About Time, Dir. Hyuck-jee Park (S. Kor), International Premiere
Journey Through Our World, Dir. Petra Lataster-Czisch, Peter Lataster (Neth), World Premiere
Much Ado About Dying, Dir. Simon Chambers (Ir/UK), International Premiere
Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Serb/Fr/Cro/Mont/ Qatar), World Premiere
Paradise, Dir. Alexander Abaturov (Fr), World Premiere
Parallel World, Dir. Mei-ling Hsiao (Tai), World Premiere
Port Desire, Dir. Juan Manuel Bugarín, (Arg), World Premiere
Portrait of My Father, Dir. Juan Ignacio Fernández Hoppe, (Ur), World Premiere
Silent House, Dir. Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian (Iran/Can/Phil/Qatar), World Premiere
Wisdom Gone Wild, Dir. Rea Tajiri (US), International Premiere
Envision Competition
Cross Words, Dir. Mario Valero (Fr), International Premiere
The Fabulous Ones, Dir. Roberta Torre (It), European Premiere
How Dare You Have Such a Rubbish Wish, Dir. Mania Akbari (Ir/UK), World Premiere
Invoked, Dir. Luka Papić, Srđa Vučo (Serb), World Premiere
Just an Alien, Dir. Weicheng Hua (China), World Premiere
Light Falls Vertical, Dir. Efthymia Zymvragaki (Sp/Ger/Neth), World Premiere
Manifesto, Dir. Angie Vinchito (Russia), World Premiere
My Lost Country, Dir. Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez (Costa/Iraq/Chil/Egypt/Fr), World Premiere
Notes for a Film, Dir. Ignacio Agüero (Chil/Fr), International Premiere
Notes on Displacement, Dir. Khaled Jarrar (Pal/Ger), World Premiere
Raw Session, Dir. As Talavistas, ela.ltda (Braz), International Premiere
Scenes with My Father, Dir. Biserka Šuran (Neth), World Premiere
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