Leading names from the documentary world are presenting new projects at the IDFA Forum coproduction and co-financing market which runs November 15-18 during the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam.
Veteran Ukrainian-born auteur Vitaly Mansky, the director of Putin’s Witnesses and Gorbachev Heaven, will pitch his latest project, Odesa.Mama. The film looks at life in Ukrainian sea port, Odesa, with Russia’s invading army lurking not far outside the city limits and the Kremlin claiming that the city’s citizens are “Russians” waiting to be liberated. The film is a co-production between the Czech Republic and Latvia, and produced by Filip Remunda.
Leading Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing presents his new project, Jiabiangou. The film tells the stories of survivors from the anti-rightist labour camp of of Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert of China. It is produced through Isabelle Glachant for CS Productions, Sonia Buchman and Nicolas R. De La Mothe for Gladys Glover Films, and Serge Lalou for Les Films d’Ici,
Emmy award winner Rachel Leah Jones is presenting her latest feature Podium (You Have Three Minutes), looking at the plight of Palestinian lawmakers trying to resist and express their sense of anguish from the podium of the Knesset. It is produced by Home Made Docs in collaboration with Temps Noir.
In total 47 projects are being presented at the Forum, including films in development, production, and near completion. They are showcased across the Forum Pitches, Roundtable Presentations, Rough Cut Presentations and IDFA DocLab Forum sections.
Among other titles at this year’s event are Josefina Buschmann Mardones’ Artificial Clouds, exploring the ecological footprint of AI in Chile, and Christina D. Bartson’s archive-based epic The Contract of the Century, telling the story of massive energy project, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and those who sought to stop it in the late 1990s.
Several new projects from the UK are also in the selection, among them Marta Miskaryan’s Near Life, made through Beehive Films, and Roxy Rezvany’s Being North Korean, produced through Besheh Meesheh Films.
Bafta award winner Victoria Mapplebeck (Motherboard) will be presenting her new project, This Pleasant Lady, in IDFA DocLab Forum. An immersive installation, it turns the director’s own body into a living archive, inviting audiences to lie inside a reimagined MRI scanner and trace the accidents, illness, loves and near-death experiences she has endured over the last six decades.
This year, the structure of the long running event has been tweaked. Certain titles will be presented to a large audience at the Forum Pitches event, now held at the DeLaMar whose main hall has over 900 seats. Others will be heard in the more intimate surroundings of the Roundtable Presentations, where in-depth conversation about the films will be possible. New media work including VR and XR is presented through IDFA DocLab Forum, which this year has 12 projects.
Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen, head of IDFA Industry, hailed a selection of works that “surprise, reveal, and embrace complexity.”
“We hope to see all of these projects find audiences, whether on screens, big or small, via headsets, or in immersive installations,” she said.
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