Nick Cunningham

IDFA Forum Award for Best Project (2,500 euro) to Alis by Nicolas van Hemelryck and Clare Weiskopf (Colombia). IDFA DocLab Forum Award for Best Project, valued at €2500, presented to Sacha Wares for Inside: A Journey Into the World of Outsider Artist Judith Scott.

In 2020 the Poles have four docs in official selection, a bagful in Docs for Sale and a project in Forum. What’s more, Polish Docs will present four new projects at the online Industry Hub 20 November. The new projects are “very diverse and that it is their strength,” says company MD Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła.

The documentary and private detective genres meet in Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent which world premiered at Sundance 2020 and is now selected for IDFA Best of Fests. The Chilean director talks to BDE.

In Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga’s Songs of Repression, screening in IDFA Best of Fests, we hear of acts of evil and encounter acts of kindness. What makes the film so compelling is that many of the film’s characters have been, at some point of their lives, more than capable of both. The directors speak to BDE.

Iranian director Firouzeh Khosrovani discusses the IDFA competition selection Radiograph of a Family, her brilliantly constructed and devastatingly moving story of her parents before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979.

A documentary about the great mass of contradictions that is Eurovision was always going to be a winner. But lob in an Icelandic grenade in the form of the BDSM-wearing anti-capitalist band Hatari who sing of hate, debauchery and the purposelessness of life, and you’ve got gold dust. A Song Called Hate director Anna Hildur talks to Business Doc Europe.

Following on from their Toxic Playground (2009), directors William Johansson Kalén and Lars Edman return to the Chilean town of Arica to continue their investigation into the poisoning of the town people, caused by Swedish waste dumped there in 1984. But this time the town has lawyers fighting its corner. Arica world premieres in IDFA Frontlight.

In Long Live Love, screening in Best of Fests, Danish director Sine Skibsholt records the loving but tempestuous relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter.

“We may make very dark films but we actually laugh a lot,” says Signe Byrge, co-founder of widely admired Danish outfit Final Cut for Real, whose very dark films include Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, The Distant Barking of Dogs by Simon Lereng Wilmont and the IDFA 2020 Best of Fests selection Songs of Repression.

The 2020 Nordic talents attending online IDFAcademy talk to Business Doc Europe about the projects they will be pitching to, and discussing this year with, the great and the good of the international documentary community.