In a modern world where work creeps further and further into one’s personal life, eating away at time and energy alike, it is a familiar feeling to realize you don’t have as much time as you would like for a partner. Chinese director Chouwa Liang currently feels that pressure, although her partner’s notion of time […]

Dutch documentarians Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch are veterans on their home turf of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam — where they won Best Dutch Film in 2014 and 2022 — but this year brought a career highlight for the renowned duo: introducing their latest doc “All Is Well” at the beautiful Tuschinski cinema […]

Jour2Fête has acquired French distribution rights to Max Keegan’s “The Shepherd and the Bear” out of IDFA and is planning to release the film theatrically in 2025. “The Shepherd and the Bear” will have its world premiere as the closing night film of the 2024 Camden International Film Festival in Maine. The documentary feature had […]

“Dry Sky,” produced by Ibrahim Omar, won the Forum Award for Best Pitch Wednesday at IDFA documentary festival in Amsterdam. “Do You Love Me,” produced by Lana Y. Daher, took home the Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, and “Looking for the Mermaid” by Yara Costa won the Producers Connection Award. The DocLab Forum Award […]

Ignorance is bliss, according to Nicolas Philibert, director of BAFTA nominee “To Be and to Have” and Berlin best film winner “On the Adamant,” discussing his approach to documentary filmmaking at IDFA in Amsterdam. The French filmmaker, whose recent films “The Typewriter and Other Headaches” and “Averroès & Rosa Parks” both screen at IDFA this […]

Documentary filmmakers and industry leaders gathered at this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam to discuss “independence and resistance in times of repressive populism” at the festival’s yearly Europe Conference in partnership with French public broadcaster Arte. IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia introduced the conference by highlighting the “rising success” of populist movements in Europe […]

Night after night, young Kenyan scholars sweat blood writing academic essays — on practically any given subject, often to gruelingly tight deadlines — for paying college students in far-away countries to pass off as their own work. The credit is non-existent, the pay pitiful given the expertise involved. But many of these tireless ghost writers […]

It’s been 10 months since “Sugarcane” first premiered at Sundance, where it picked up the Directing Award: U.S. for documentary. Since then, directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat have landed a worldwide distribution deal with National Geographic Documentary Films and have traveled across the world with their film, now stopping at the International Documentary […]

Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, whose “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” won an award for cinematic innovation at Sundance, mused on the significance of the “symbolic act” during a talk at documentary festival IDFA on Sunday. Speaking in the art-deco splendor of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski movie theater, Grimonprez started with an extract from his film “Shadow World,” […]

After premiering “Terrestrial Verses” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, Iranian director Ali Asgari returned home to Tehran to find out he was banned from traveling for eight months, as well as having his personal belongings confiscated by the government authorities for weeks. The result of that period of uncertainty and introspection is the […]

Most films want their audiences to suspend disbelief. “About a Hero” would prefer they keep it close at hand. “Viewers are advised to exercise caution in trusting its visual and auditory components,” runs an onscreen disclaimer near the beginning of Polish filmmaker Piotr Winiewicz’s irreverent exercise in AI-enabled storytelling — a knowingly contentious opening film […]

Taskovski Films Sales has acquired Miguel Calderón’s “Loss Adjustment,” ahead of its international premiere in the Envision Competition at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The film follows Pedro, a loss adjuster, who travels across Mexico investigating the causes of major catastrophes while dealing with corrupt “scavengers” who profit from human tragedy. To escape the depravity […]

Romanian director Radu Jude thinks it’s time for filmmakers to start taking TikTok seriously. During an in-conversation event at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Jude pulled out his smartphone and showed a series of TikToks to the audience, saying, “To me, TikTok is like the beginning of cinema. It’s like Lumiére. Filmmakers are in […]

Taskovski Films Sales has picked up “Home Game,” directed by Lidija Zelovic, which will have its world premiere on Friday in the International Competition section of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Zelovic has been filming her family in the Netherlands since 1993, when they fled their war-torn home in Sarajevo. Her film exposes the […]

Last year’s industry program at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) placed great emphasis on the livelihood of documentarians as the industry sees budgets shrink and European funding bodies like public broadcasters invest less. Have things changed in the past year as the festival prepares for another edition? Unfortunately not, says Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen, […]

Syndicado Film Sales has boarded documentary “Bright Future,” which has its world premiere at IDFA. Variety debuts the trailer here. The film is the directorial debut of Romanian archive researcher Andra MacMasters. “Bright Future” goes back to the summer of 1989 when thousands of young people from various nations gathered in North Korea for the […]

Director Piotr Winiewicz is very aware of the inflammatory potential of discussions about AI within the film community. Still, he hopes his IDFA-opening feature debut “About a Hero” will rise above the discourse to inspire much-needed conversation about the future of technology concerning artistic practices and creativity. “About a Hero” is a docufiction hybrid experiment […]

Taskovski Films Sales has picked up “Light Memories,” which will have its world premiere in the international competition section of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. In the film, which is the feature directorial debut of photographer Misha Vallejo Prut, photography, fractured memories and family secrets converge in an exploration of the effects of absent […]

Orwa Nyrabia, the artistic director of leading documentary festival IDFA in Amsterdam, will step down from his position on July 1, which is the end of his present term. Nyrabia commented: “I have always seen this great role as an artistic endeavor, as a responsibility much more important and critical than being merely a job. […]