IDFA 25

A Fox Under a Pink Moon picked up the Best Film in International Competition while Past Future Continuous won Best Film in the Envision Competition. The IDFA Award for Best Directing (worth €5,000) in International Competition went to Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel for The Kartli Kingdom while The IDFA Award for Best First Feature went to Paikar by Dawood Hilmandi. The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film was won by Maasja Ooms for My Word Against Mine.

In the intimate and personal, at times melancholic All My Sisters, two sisters’ coming of age in Iran is beautifully documented by their uncle. The subsequent film, in which the sisters are invited to observe and comment on the material he had shot for almost two decades, speaks of family, loyalty and compassion, but also of oppression and resistance.

In this entertaining, clever and very personal film, what at first appears to be a culture clash story about a Chinese film student returning home from Poland to her family in Huai’an, explodes – or rather, implodes – into something much more intensely and darkly personal, and therefore highly universal. What’s more, it includes some of the most intense and intimate arguments you will have ever witnessed in a documentary film.

Amy Goodman is remarkable. As host and executive producer of Democracy Now, she is a multi-award-winning standard-bearer for independent journalism and a fearless advocate for a just society. Besides a multi-layered portrait, Steal this Story Please! film is a celebration of resistance and compassion, but which furthermore shows just how much the concept of a free press is in danger.

Iraqi filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour has never forgotten the sudden disappearance of her 10-year old friend, Nour. That incident has gnawed away at her for years, even as she has become a very successful filmmaker, producer and actor. She returns to the incident in her haunting debut feature-length documentary, Flana, whose title is Iraqi slang for a forgotten woman - and that’s precisely what Nour was to become. Ghandour discusses her film with BDE.

Within a bleak and fading Armenian retirement home – where the ages of residents range from 60 to over 90 - a theatre director sets about casting for his ensemble production of ‘Shakespeare’s Sins.’ While, in the play, we see how Shakespeare’s characters call him to account for their tragic fates, the documentary equally offers the opportunity to delve into the diverse and complex lives of this aged community. 

There’s a gentle prodding of issues surrounding AI in this documentary-fiction hybrid by Marc Isaacs, in which a research lab requests access to his documentaries to help train their AI to display more ‘sincerity’. The resulting film is highly entertaining with its interplay between the real and the artificial but, intellectually, it does not delve so deeply. What ‘sincerity’ is or could be – or could be defined as for AI purposes – is never seriously discussed.

The Russian filmmaker discusses Trillion, his new and critically lauded documentary, and the second film in his ‘empathy’ trilogy, with Business Doc Europe. The film features, throughout, a mysterious woman who walks barefoot across the coastal terrain, again and again casting a very particular essence into the sea. “From the second I met her, I thought what she does is extraordinary,” Kossakovsky says of the woman whose identity he still refuses to disclose.

The rise of Elon Musk’s ground-breaking electric car operation Tesla serves as a fascinating backdrop for Andreas Pichler’s jarring and revealing feature documentary, as a fatal accident in Florida triggers a protracted lawsuit to hold the company accountable, bringing into serious doubt the company’s much-hyped “autopilot” function.

A 5-day training initiative designed to strengthen the children’s doc sector kicked off November 17 at IDFA, with a cohort of 15 filmmakers from across Germany, Flanders, Poland, and the Netherlands. The stated aim of the program is to ‘foster international co-productions, encourage mutual exchange within the industry, and strengthen the children’s documentary genre as a whole.’