IDFA 2020

Gorbachev. Heaven shows a vulnerable, yet proud and quietly cunning old man, stuck in time, with nothing to lose.

The dream to make a sleepy French village a Mecca for auteur documentary makes for an intriguing and ultimately enthralling story.

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.

“As you know, Danish documentary makers tend to travel out into the world. They were challenged by the whole situation,” Cecilia Lidin, doc consultant at the Danish Film Institute, observes of how the local doc community reacted earlier this year when, thanks to the Corona lockdown, their wings were suddenly clipped.

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.

Matti Paunio started his job as Head of Production at The Finnish Film Foundation in the autumn of last year. Then, the pandemic came. “As with everybody, this was a total surprise and changed a lot of things we had planned,” Paunio says of the sudden challenges posed by Covid-19.