Geoffrey Macnab

It’s Saturday lunchtime in Amsterdam and Sergei Loznitsa, a very regular visitor to IDFA, is preparing for the world premiere of his latest film, Mr Landsbergis, a world premiere in the festival’s international competition. In a few moments snatched away from his lunch break, the ever busy Loznitsa explains the story behind his new doc.

For many years, Dutch films at IDFA were presented within their own special programme. This year the Dutch sidebar is gone. Instead documentaries from the Netherlands are spread throughout the festival, within the new Envision and International Competitions, and elsewhere. For Simone van den Broek, the new documentary Consultant at the Netherlands Film Fund, this turns out to be an inspiring change, she explains.

Sergei Loznitsa’s feature documentary, Babi Yar, Context, screening in Masters, is part of a much bigger project, The Babyn Yar Memorial Centre, which is being overseen by the Russian director, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, who also shot his massive and still ongoing Dau cycle of films and installations in Ukraine. Khrzhanovskiy explains to Business Doc Europe.

The MTV-backed doc Ascension, which premiered at Tribeca where it won Best Documentary and the Albert Maysles Award, is screening in the market at IDFA. Director Jessica Kingdon discusses the genesis of the documentary with Business Doc Europe.

For her debut feature doc Chinese director Qinyuan Lei returned to the city where she grew up initially to shoot a film about industry and the hardware eco-system, until she met two small siblings having the time of their lives being very mischievous. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Film historian Nikolai Izvolov briefs Business Doc Europe on the rescue and restoration of Russian master Dziga Vertov’s epic The History Of The Civil War which will, during IDFA, be screened for the first time in a cinema to the general public. The momentous event takes place in the Tuschinski on Saturday November 20.

There is a pervasive Polish presence within every nook and cranny of this year’s IDFA at which the sales and industry promotion agency Polish Docs is celebrating its 15th anniversary. “The most important change is that a 1000% more films are now screened internationally,” manager Katarzyna Wilk tells BDE of her organisation’s enormous impact over this period.

Meet Oli London, social media influencer, online personality and someone utterly obsessed with South Korean pop culture. London, the subject of Gangnam Beauty (a world premiere at IDFA) may be English-born but has spent a fortune on plastic surgery (including several botched operations) in order to look like a K-Pop idol. Director Tomaszewski faces off with BDE.

A world premiere in IDFA International Competition, Journey To The Sun marks the first occasion when revered Portuguese filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias co-directs a film with Ansgar Schaefer (her partner and usually her producer). The filmmakers discuss their collaboration with Business Doc Europe.

What David Simon did for Baltimore in The Wire and what Fred Wiseman has done with institutions all over the US in his films, Peter Nicks is doing for Oakland, California. Hulu documentary Homeroom is the third in his trilogy set in the city, following on from The Waiting Room (2012), set in a hospital waiting room and The Force (2017), looking at the inner workings of the city police department as it tries to reform.