Festival:
The 35th IDFA
Dates:
November 9-20
About:
Nearly 150 new and recent documentary features make up the lineup of the largest nonfiction event in the world.
Among the offerings:
International Competition:
COLETTE AND JUSTIN
Director: Alain Kassanda
The filmmaker and his grandparents explore their family history in this richly layered portrait, drawing together politics and personal memories.
DREAMING ARIZONA
Director: Jon Bang Carlsen
Five teenagers from a small Arizona town stage their own lives—past, present and future—blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
GIRL WHO DREAMS ABOUT TIME
Director: Hyuck-jee Park
A coming-of-age film about the young shaman Sujin, who oversees a temple together with her grandmother in the mountains of South Korea.
MUCH ADO ABOUT DYING
Director: Simon Chambers
This tragicomic portrait of the filmmaker’s eccentric uncle demonstrates that death comes as a necessary end to life, caregiving is a heavy responsibility, and it’s wonderful to recite Shakespeare stark naked.
PARADISE
Director: Alexander Abaturov
After a heatwave leads to huge forest fires in Siberia, villagers join forces to subdue the inferno they call the Dragon.
PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER
Director: Juan Ignacio Fernández Hoppe
When the filmmaker was eight, his father’s body was found on a beach near Montevideo, leading him on a quest now to find out what happened, and who his father was.
SILENT HOUSE
Director: Farnaz Jurabchian, Mohammadreza Jurabchian
The fortunes of three generations of an upper-middle-class family are set against the backdrop of four decades of Iranian history.
Envision Competition:
HOW DARE YOU HAVE SUCH A RUBBISH WISH
Director: Mania Akbari
Excerpts spanning Iranian film history show that women have always been oppressed, also in the years before the Islamic Revolution.
INVOKED
Director: Luka Papić, Srđa Vučo
A hyperdynamically edited film about the first free elections in Serbia in 1990, which were won by Slobodan Milošević.
JUST AN ALIEN
Director: Weicheng Hua
A spiritually-minded vagabond guides the viewer through the extraordinary world of the “Foreigners Street” Chinese amusement park in Chongqing, a surreal sanctuary full of strange structures, from UFOs to an Egyptian pyramid.
LIGHT FALLS VERTICAL
Director: Efthymia Zymvragaki
The filmmaker combines the story of a perpetrator and her own experiences with violence in a poetic film that offers insight into the causes and consequences of abuse.
MANIFESTO
Director: Angie Vinchito
A dark mosaic of often-shocking videos that Russian teenagers have posted on social media.
MY LOST COUNTRY
Director: Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez
Family photographs, extracts from letters, and audio recordings construct a loving portrait of the filmmaker’s exiled theater director father, and an elegy to their lost homeland of Iraq.
IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary:
FATIMA
Director: Lucia Chicos, Alexandra Diaconu
The video diary of 18-year-old Fatima, who fled Afghanistan with her family and now lives in Bucharest.
Luminous:
ART TALENT SHOW
Director: Adéla Komrzý, Tomas Bojar
A humorous look at the entrance exams at the Prague art academy, held under the watchful eye of the receptionist.
BETWEEN FATHER AND SON
Director: Ronin Hsu
A patient family portrait, featuring an elderly father, who lives with his wife in the Chinese countryside, and their alcoholic son, who lives in the city.
BLUE ID
Director: Burcu Melekoglu, Vuslat Karan
An intimate report on the transition of the former actress Rüzgar Erkoçlar, who has to go through his journey of self-realization under media scrutiny in the traditional society of Turkey.
GUAPO’Y
Director: Sofia Paoli Thorne
Celsa looks back on her time as a political prisoner during the brutal regime of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay.
LOVING MARTHA
Director: Daniela López
The filmmaker aims her camera at her grandmother Martha, who escaped a violent marriage after 39 years, and at the rest of the family, who is struggling not only with that trauma but also with the film project itself.
THE NORTHEAST WINDS
Director: Nikoloz Bezhanishvili
Local Stalinists resist when the statue of Stalin in Gori, the dictator’s birthplace, is torn down – immersed in nostalgia and ideology, they fail to see that the world has irrevocably changed.
SHANGRI-LA, PARADISE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Director: Mirka Duijn, Nina Spiering
Though the earthly paradise of Shangri-La was invented by James Hilton for his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, local authorities claim it was rediscovered two decades ago, prompting this playful investigation to unpack all the myths and tales.
SISTERHOOD
Director: Mohamed James Sessy Kamara
A vibrant and richly emotional portrait of spirited twin sisters Husai and Hassi, who have decided to leave Sierra Leone to seek work in the Middle East, but still must persuade their mother.
THE SOILED DOVES OF TIJUANA
Director: Jean-Charles Hue
Whether they’re all dressed up and in full make-up, or looking like the Virgin Mary, the inhabitants of the red light district of Tijuana, Mexico, live in a world of their own.
STUNTWOMEN
Director: Elena Avdija
Stuntwomen Virginie, Petra and Estelle usually they play the victim, while men are the heroes – where are the roles for action heroines?
Frontlight:
BEYOND EXTINCTION: SINIXT RESURGENCE
Director: Ali Kazimi
A richly documented, vivid panorama of the bizarre history of the Sinixt, an indigenous Canadian people legally declared extinct in 1956.
DORPIE
Director: Julia Jaki
A sensitive character study of Lana, a woman who is showing herself to be a grassroots leader in a South African town where femicide is commonplace.
THE ETILAAT ROZ
Director: Abbas Rezaie
As Kabul is recaptured by the Taliban, the passionate journalists of the Etilaat Roz daily newspaper grow increasingly concerned.
HEROIC BODIES
Director: Sara Suliman
The story of the development of women’s rights in Sudan is told through unique archive material and interviews with activists.
KENYA
Director: Gisela Delgadillo
Raw and frank portrait of Kenya, a trans woman who lives in Mexico City who witnessed her friend, a fellow transgender sex worker, being murdered by a client.
THE LAST DOLPHIN KING
Director: Luis Ansorena Hervés, Ernest Riera
The story of the rise and fall of the controversial Spanish dolphin trainer Jose Luis Barbero.
THE LOST SOULS OF SYRIA
Director: Stéphane Malterre, Garance Le Caisne
A probing account of attempts in various European countries to chart the crimes of the Syrian regime and bring the perpetrators to justice, based on thousands of smuggled photos of tortured and murdered victims.
R 21 AKA RESTORING SOLIDARITY
Director: Mohanad Yaqubi
Militant films made between 1960 and 1980 presented the Palestinian struggle as a shining example to Japanese people opposed to US hegemony, but an epilogue questions the boundary between sympathy, propaganda, and identification.
RACIST TREES
Director: Sara Newens, Mina T Son
Can a tree be racist? Residents of Crossley Tract, a historically Black neighborhood in Palm Springs, wrestled with this curious question for decades, culminating in heated discussions on national TV.
TRAINED TO SEE – THREE WOMEN AND THE WAR
Director: Luzia Schmid
An inspiring portrait of Margaret Bourke-White, Martha Gellhorn, and Lee Miller, three pioneering journalists who made history as the first female correspondents to report on the Second World War.
Paradocs:
DANSE MACABRE
Director: Thunska Pansittivorakul, Phassarawin Kulsomboon
A wild collage of scenes of state oppression and suspicious deaths that have taken place in Thailand over the last 90 years.
EUROPE
Director: Philip Scheffner
From one day to the next, an Algerian woman is driven into illegality.
PRIVATE FOOTAGE
Director: Janaína Nagata
A desktop documentary using open source research to expose the appalling reality beyond the frames of a carefree family vacation film, shot in early-1960s South Africa.
Masters:
AMERICAN JOURNAL
Director: Arnaud des Pallières
A collage of street scenes, news footage, and anonymous archive material shows the United States at the height of its power, but gradually shifts from euphoria to nightmare.
THE GOLDEN THREAD
Director: Nishtha Jain
Beautifully composed images and an immersive sound design capture the last vestiges of Bengal’s jute industry, which has been virtually unchanged since the industrial revolution.
GOODBYE, CAPTAIN
Director: Vincent Carelli
For decades, Vincent Carelli filmed the struggles of his friend Krohokrenhum, leader of the Gavião in the Brazilian Amazon, a man who tirelessly defends the traditions of his people against political, economic and cultural assimilation.
THE KIEV TRIAL
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
In January 1946, 15 Nazis were put on trial in Kiev for their role in the murder of 10,000 civilians in Ukraine.
THE LAND
Director: Ivars Seleckis
Measured observations of the annual cycles in a rural Latvian community.
LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO
Director: Coco Schrijber
A film about love, and about anger hidden inside that can erupt without warning.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
A painfully topical archive documentary mainly featuring footage of Allied bombing during the Second World War, asking whether mass destruction can ever be morally justified.
RUTHLESS TIMES – SONGS OF CARE
Director: Susanna Helke
An unorthodox combination of classic documentary and musical is a sharp indictment of market forces in the care for the elderly in Finland.
THE YELLOW CEILING
Director: Isabel Coixet
A powerful account of abuse at a Spanish youth theater school.
Best of Fests:
ANHELL69
Director: Theo Montoya
When the young queer actor he cast to star in a vampire film dies of an overdose, the filmmaker dives deeper into the no-future generation of Medellín.
CAMOUFLAGE
Director: Jonathan Perel
Do those who live near the Argentinian army base Campo de Mayo still remember its dark past?
THE ECLIPSE
Director: Nataša Urban
Framed by the solar eclipses of 1961 and 1999, this essayistic documentary examines how a Serbian family—and an entire country—relates to a turbulent history.
GIGI LA LEGGE
Director: Alessandro Comodin
A sun-soaked portrait of Gigi, a police officer investigating a worrying series of suicides in a charming small Italian town.
HOW TO SAVE A DEAD FRIEND
Director: Marusya Syroechkovskaya
The love between like-minded millennials Marusya and Kimi turns to agony as Kimi gradually disappears into serious drug addiction.
PORNOMELANCOLÍA
Director: Manuel Abramovich
Mexican nude model and gay porn actor Lalo Santos is his own boss, successful online, and the star of a porn film about Zapata.
A PROVINCIAL HOSPITAL
Director: Ilian Metev, Ivan Chertov, Zlatina Teneva
An observational documentary filmed in a Bulgarian provincial hospital, where a close-knit community has been hit by Covid-19.
STEEL LIFE
Director: Manuel Bauer
Breathtaking landscapes alternate with scenes of somber small-town life on a train trip across Peru.
what (not) to doc 