IDFA 2021

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.

This endearing portrait of multi-faceted trans artist and adult performer Tara Emory impresses with its gentle approach to potentially sensationalist subject matter. It shows Emory as, above all, an interesting individual – who just happens to make some really cool retrofuturistic sci-fi porn.

The Covid-19 pandemic may well have dominated television news coverages for months, especially at its height in 2020, but that doesn’t detract from the immersive power of director Matthew Heineman’s new film The First Wave, which recounts in grim but pragmatic detail the experiences of those on the front line of New York’s response to the health crisis.

Turn Your Body to the Sun comprises a journey both to the past and to the east. Aliona Van der Horst follows Dutch writer Sana Valiulina (also with Russian, Tatar and with Estonian roots) as she attempts to understand the fate not only of her father who, like millions of others, was subject to the whims of two despots, Stalin and Hitler, but also that of the 3.3 million Soviet POWs who were starved to death during the war.

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 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.

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.

Open, illuminating, sad and powerful, and often painfully honest and confrontational, Four Journeys examines the impact on both the director and his family of China’s one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979.

The Netflix doc Procession is the tender but often also traumatic story of six Midwestern men, all survivors of childhood sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy, who come together to create a drama therapy-inspired experiment designed to collectively work through their traumas.

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.