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The third and most prescient of director Peter Nicks’ trilogy of vérité portraits of life in Oakland, California, Homeroom is a film that is, in equal part, impressive, immersive and insightful, and made with real compassion and respect.

Charting the odyssey taken by Greek marble as it is shipped to China, sculpted into objets d’art and then transported back to Greece, only to be bought by Chinese tourists, the doc is gently ironic and eminently watchable, and blessed with a satisfyingly light touch.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Mr. Landsbergis wins IDFA Award for Best Film in International Competition. Octopus by Karim Kassem wins IDFA Award for Best Film in Envision Competition. Shamira Raphaëla’s Shabu picks up award for Best Youth doc, while Jason by Maasja Ooms is awarded Best Dutch Film. All winners…

Treating youngsters with respect and demanding respect in return is the astute and impressive ethos of Las Delicias, an agro-technical boarding school in the Argentina countryside in the province of Entre Ríos, where more than 120 youngsters live, learn and play together.

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.

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.

Acclaimed veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio is in deeply contemplative mood with Marx Can Wait, a warmly personal film that sees him delving into family history, and in particular the circumstances surrounding his twin brother Camillo’s suicide, allowing for insight and reflection as he gathers the surviving members of his family around him more than 50 years later.

Stylistically dreamlike and emotionally intimate, Srđan Keča’s debut feature, world premiering at IDFA, leads us into the homeless lives of a young girl, her mother and an ersatz grandmother, living in the basement of the never completed Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade.

There are, of course, plenty of films that have looked into the Covid global pandemic, but director Nanfu Wang’s remarkable film – which screens at IDFA – manages to take its viewers on a rollercoaster journey as she details the start of the crisis in her native China and its devastating human impact, but also the political machinations of both the Chinese and US governments as each tried to spin the crisis.

In Maia Kenworthy and Elena Sanchez Bellot’s smartly constructed film the ultimate achievement – and one which is at the heart of the film – is the very real impact that Extinction Rebellion has had on tackling climate change.