IDFA 2021

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.

The IDFA Bertha Fund Managing Director and IDFA Deputy Director explains to Business Doc Europe how the fund’s role has taken on even more significance over the past 18 months, and how proud she is of this year’s “super harvest” of IBF-supported films.

Less is definitely more in Penny Andrea’s engaging and highly original documentary that chronicles her radically altered state after the diagnosis of a brain tumor. With nothing more than her drawings and her monotone voice-over, she creates a fascinating journey both through time and her magnificent mind within a filmic testimony to resilience, creativity and humour.

“We're in the business of emotions. We're not selling chairs or glasses. We’re selling stories,” First Hand Films’ Esther van Messel tells Business Doc Europe as she eyes up the prospect of industry gatherings once more at IDFA 2021.

In her self-shot film, selected for IDFA Best of Fests, Cléo Cohen, a granddaughter of Jewish Arabs form Tunisia and Algeria, is determined to discover her identity. She spoke to Business Doc Europe about the emotional and evocative journey that results, as well as colonization and the essential business (at least from her grandmothers’ perspective) of straightening her very curly hair…

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.

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.

The IDFA Forum Awards were announced Nov 24 with Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff's project La Casa winning the IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch, Anna Shishova-Bogolubova's The New Greatness picking up the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, while the DocLab Forum Award went to Continuum VR by Daniela Maldonado, Tomas Espinosa, and Paula Gempeler. Each award includes a cash prize of €1500.

Dutch director Shamira Raphaëla talks to Business Doc Europe about the force of nature that is Shabu, a 14-year-old kid living in one of Rotterdam’s roughest estates, but blessed with boundless talent, entrepreneurial savvy and a ton of teenage charm.

Jason is the third and final part of Maasja Ooms’ trilogy about the failing Dutch youth welfare services, in which the eponymous hero (and there really is something genuinely heroic about Jason) seeks to overcome systemic inadequacies, in the process transforming into an articulate advocate for reform. The documentary won Best Dutch Film at IDFA last week.