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The world’s biggest documentary film festival is starting to roll out its competition lineup for the 2024 event.
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), set to run from November 14-24, unveiled the full slate for the Short Documentary section today, featuring 12 world premieres among the 16 titles in competition. Among them is Iron, a new 40-minute film from Ukrainian-born, Latvia-based director Vitaly Mansky (Eastern Front, Putin’s Witnesses). [Scroll for the complete list of competition films and other titles announced today].
According to Mansky’s website, Iron “consists of several novels about humans and military equipment in cities where military equipment resembles monuments on pedestals, where it is exhibited in fairs and special events, where it adorns festive parades and rusts in scrap yards.”
Other highlights from the Short Documentary competition include “personal stories on grief, such as the mixed media exploration into losing someone close to you, Tough Love by Pat Heywood, and stop-motion animation Mama Micra by Rebecca Blöcher that examines how far people are willing to go to quench their thirst for personal freedom,” IDFA notes.
In another of the Short Documentary titles, The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, director Theo Panagopoulos “revisits archival footage of Palestine’s floral splendor from the 1930s, showing the complex relationship between the land and its inhabitants.”
IDFA also revealed the lineups for its Youth Documentary competition, a curated list of films separated into two sections – films of special relevance to the age group 9-12, and films of special relevance to the age group 13+.
Among the Youth Documentary highlights, IDFA cites My Homeland: “Moving beyond one-dimensional stereotypes, Tabarak Allah Abbas replaces people with cyborgs in her imaginative animation that tells the story of how her parents overcame fleeing Iraq, packed as a superhero adventure.”
In reference to another Youth Documentary film, IDFA writes, “In a break from traditional narrative arch, Camille Vigny’s Crushed parallels the story of a young girl’s love story turned violent with footage of car race crashes.”
Heading into its 37th edition, the festival released the first details on several of other high-profile sections: Signed, a showcase for “the latest cinematic adventures of some of the most original filmmakers of our time,” and Paradocs, which puts the spotlight on “the year’s experimental documentary art.”
IDFA announced the first documentaries selected for its prestigious Best of Fests category, the festival’s choice of the top documentary films that have premiered earlier in the year (additional Best of Fests titles will be revealed in October). Those films include:
IDFA’s International Competition lineup and other slates will be announced in the coming weeks.
These are the program details announced today:
Selected films: IDFA Competition for Short Documentary
Selected films: IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary Films in the 9-12 category:
Films in the 13+ category:
Signed
Signed showcases the latest cinematic adventures of some of the most original filmmakers of our time. The program celebrates those with a unique artistic signature, beyond the canon.
This edition’s selection is illustrious, bringing together the most well-known filmmakers and a younger generation of exceptional auteurs. Among them, award-winning filmmaker Radu Jude presents found-footage documentary Eight Postcards from Utopia, showing the commercials from Romania’s transition to a capitalist democracy, and impressionist desktop film Sleep #2, capturing live stream recordings of Andy Warhol’s grave. With a singular artistic approach, Mati Diop’s widely celebrated Dahomey critically examines questions of repatriation of African artefacts from Europe.
Several renowned directors push the boundaries of music film in this year’s program. Andrei Ujică revisits 1965 in TWST – Things We Said Today, offering a poetic yet unembellished look at The Beatles as they captivate New York while the Watts riots erupt in Los Angeles. Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko creatively collages early ‘70s footage, exploring Lennon and Ono’s idealistic vision for a better world. The full program will be announced in October.
Best of Fests
The expansive Best of Fests section presents the year’s most eye-catching and celebrated films from various festivals from around the world. The selection uses vastly diverse styles and genres to take us to the world’s most burning topics.
The pressing urgency of conflict is ever-present in the selection. The outstanding film No Other Land by Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balal, Rachel Szor, and Basel Adra documents ceaseless Israeli attacks on a network of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The film received IDFA Bertha Fund support in 2022. In Sudan, Remember Us, Hind Meddeb captures young activists in their struggle for a livable and democratic Sudan.
Other films traverse the world to depict heartfelt stories of resistance. After experiencing sexual assault, journalist Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries documents her search for justice in the face of a Japanese culture of silence. Following the discovery of unmarked graves near an indigenous reserve, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane reveals a long history of abuse and neglect of indigenous children in Canadian state-led boarding schools. The full selection will be announced in October.
Paradocs
Paradocs showcases the year’s experimental documentary art. Several established names in the visual arts present their explorations into filmmaking. Avant-garde legend John Smith reflects on his life and career by means of his nondescript name in Being John Smith.
In Misty Man, Ansuya Blom alternates powerful scenes of a young man behind barbed wire with 8mm footage from the family archive and footage shot more recently in Suriname. Showcasing filmmakers experiment into form, highlights include the visceral and harrowing first-person documentation of the trenches in Ukraine in Real by filmmaker Oleh Sentsov. The full selection will be announced in October.
