IDFA 2020

Producer Emile Hertling Péronard has been taking his first steps into new media this week as part of the team pitching Thunder And Drum as a DocLab Forum Project.

In Bitter Love, screening in Best of Fests, Jerzy Sladkowski tells us that while the rest of the world takes to the road to deal their problems, Russians take to the river. In this instance on a Volga cruise ship, full of lonely hearts. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Saskia Gubbels’ Sheltered in Dutch Competition is a paean to love for our furry four-legged friends. But set in the Amsterdam Animal Shelter, it is also an indictment of the human species and its frequent propensity towards cruelty. The director explains all.

An impressively structured film rich in terms of beautifully composed images which brings an understated anger about what has befallen its central character.

Chiledoc is out in force November 19 during IDFA Industry, as a delegation of doccers present a selection of upcoming features. IDFA also presents two Chilean world-premieres in 2020. The Sky Is Red plays in First Appearance while Arica is selected for Frontlight.

Leading Belgian producer Hanne Phlypo of Clin d’Oeil Films has revealed further details of her hugely ambitious new project, Draw For Change!, a Forum selection in IDFA this week.

David France’s Welcome to Chechnya, which lifts the lid on rampant and violent homophobia in the Chechen Republic, is finding some of its biggest audiences in Russia via the BBC Russia service. However, as France told BDE, the film has also been pirated so heavily that it has been seen millions of times.

No film at IDFA this year tells a story stranger or more unsettling than Love It Was Not, recent winner of Best Israeli Film at Docaviv and screening in Luminous. It’s an account of a love affair, if it can be described as such, between beautiful a young Jewish Auschwitz inmate, Helena Citron, and Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer.

These are halcyon days for Swiss documentary. The country has 11 different titles in official selection in IDFA, ranging from the opening film Arami Ullón’s Nothing But The Sun to another Feature-length competition entry Radiograph Of A Family to titles in Short Competition, Kids & Docs and all other corners of the festival too.

An Ordinary Country, Tomasz Wolski’s immersion into the Secret Service archives of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, packs a considerable political punch, and delivers on an aesthetic level too. The Best of Fests director explains all to BDE.