IDFA 2022

Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden discusses her affectionate portrait of a favoured aunt who, during her final years, succumbed little by little to dementia. The portrait is funny, touching and very personal. At one point, when tasting a delicious morsel Ria remarks how it is “even better than an orgasm,” a phrase that the director claims her aunt was happy to resort to even when having her toe nails clipped.

Dutch/Croatian director Biserka Šuran discusses her new documentary which examines her Balkan roots, and those of her Croatian father, a man who feels he is “floating” between two cultures since emigrating to the Netherlands after the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia. The film world premieres at IDFA 2022.

“I don’t know why but we are obsessed with ethnicity here.” With her new doc All You See, produced by mint film office and world premiering as IDFA opening film, director Niki Padidar hopes to make Dutch audiences aware of the way they look at newcomers, and how their preconceptions can affect others often without them even realising it.

The Polish director talks to Business Doc Europe about her feature documentary which world premieres at IDFA 2022. Produced by Esther van Messel, the film follows Antek, a very conservative, very Catholic young man whose personal world is defined by both nationalism and celibacy. But little by little, he becomes curious about the outer world, and especially about the women in it…

After chancing upon Winslow, Arizona – during a long drive he needed a place to sleep for the night – veteran Danish doccer Jon Bang Carlsen ended up falling in love with the place, and decided to set his latest doc there, about teenagers exploring the idea of freedom. “They all have some kind of scars,” the director says of his young cast. “Those scars can either bring them down or could make them wiser and more prepared to go on in life.”

Much Ado About Dying is a documentary with very unlikely origins, British documentary maker Simon Chambers tells BDE. The original idea had been to make a movie called Carmageddon about traffic congestion and climate change in Delhi. Instead, Chambers left the traffic fumes in India far behind and ended up back in London, looking after his uncle David, whose health was failing.

London-based German filmmaker Eva Weber was never an Angela Merkel supporter, but she was always an admirer. “What I’ve really come to admire is her fact-based, pragmatic, reasoned, compromise-seeking approach that is so in contrast to the populist leaders of our world,” the director tells Business Doc Europe. Weber’s new film Merkel receives its European premiere at IDFA.

Khaled Jarrar’s documentary (a world premiere at IDFA) is a refugee story with a difference. The Palestinian artist and director joined a family fleeing the Syrian war on their nightmarish trip across Europe. He wasn’t a news reporter, exploiting their predicament for headlines. He was their friend, looking on at events with their eyes, sharing their hunger, cold and humiliation as well as their fury. He explains more to BDE.

As one of the characters puts it in The Hamlet Syndrome, it’s not about choice, it’s about responsibility. She is one of five actors who have returned from active military service on the Donbass frontline, even before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, to perform in a play loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy. For them, the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has immeasurable poignancy and weight in existential terms, as the directors tell BDE.

IDFA 2022 unveiled November 2 its juries across nine competitive sections, including International, Envision, Dutch, Youth, Short and Use of Archive Competitions, as well as Doclab. “Made up of some of the most esteemed names in documentary film, our festival juries are an indispensable part of IDFA and fulfil an honorable role of immense value,” writes the festival.