IDFA 2020

Kids and Docs embraces young adults in 2020, explains co-ordinator Marije Veenstra to Business Doc Europe ahead of IDFA Junior Day at Amsterdam’s Eye. Plus there is a VR in competition for the first time, alongside 12 short and feature documentaries.

Irena Taskovski focusses on “the positive, while letting docs connect us,” as she picks up world rights for three more IDFA titles. This boosts a slate that already includes Main Competition titles Radiograph of a Family and War and Peace.

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.

Mandy Chang, Commissioning Editor BBC Storyville, has been steeped in Forum projects this week, listening to pitches, holding one-on-one meetings and watching rough cuts. It’s all part of her ongoing quest to discover new doc gems that Storyville might board.

Álvarez’s observational black-and-white film intimately documents the intense sessions of a reading group who meet in a Buenos Aires café.

Adventurous new Swiss doc sales outfit Lightdox has added a new football hooligan title to a slate that already includes 5 IDFA titles and one in Docs for Sale. IDFA titles include Arica, which world prems in Frontlight, and Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria (in Best of Fests).

When lockdown began, industry misgivings were shared at newsreel archive British Pathé, which holds huge amounts of film material from 1896, the very start of cinema, to the early 1980s. Would anyone pay to license this material during such a difficult period? The answer was a resounding ‘yes’.

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.