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No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor was awarded November 23 the IDFA NPO Doc Audience Award 2024, the grand public prize of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The award was followed by a special screening of the film in Amsterdam’s Royal Theater Tuschinski. International sales of No Other Land are handled by Autlook. The film is twice-nominated for the upcoming European Film Awards in the Documentary and Best Film categories. 

Polish Maciej J. Drygas’s feature doc picked up the €15,000 top prize. Chronicles of the Absurd won Best Film in the Envision Competition also valued at €15,000. The IDFA Award for Best Directing (worth €5,000) in the International Competition went to Auberi Edler for An American Pastoral (France). The Best Dutch Film nod went to Luuk Bouwman for The Propagandist, Best First Feature went to CycleMahesh (India) by Suhel Banerjee and the  FIPRESCI Award went to Writing Hawa by Najiba Noori. All prizes…

The market for co-creation and co-production of DOK.fest München is now looking for “strong documentary projects” across all development stages and formats for its next edition running 7 to 11 May 2025. DOK.forum Marketplace presents up to 40 selected projects participating in on-stage pitch events, roundtables and one-to-one meetings, connecting them with high level international professionals.

The 2024 IDFA Forum Awards were announced November 20 with Ibrahim Omar’s project Dry Sky winning the IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch. Lana Y. Daher’s Do You Love Me picked up the Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, while the DocLab Forum Award went to Amorphous by May Abdalla. The new Producers Connection Award was won by Yara Costa for Looking for the Mermaid. Each award includes a cash prize of €1,500.

The Cinéma du réel professional sidebar event for projects nearing completion “actively supports the distribution, promotion and placement of feature documentaries by linking, at a key stage of the production process, project holders (filmmakers and producers) to industry professionals.” The projects are selected in line with the editorial policy of the host festival, running 26-27 March 2025.

The prizes went to 6 projects in development at the end of the Hungarian platform, which is a partnership between Verzió Film Festival and the international festival network DocAround Europe. Prizes include the €1,500 HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery development prize which was awarded to the Greek project Moving Sisters by Christos Stefanou. The Best Hungarian prize went to Loránd Balázs Imre’s Bee In My Mouth.

BDE caught up with Chinese-Dutch film producer Jia Zhao, who spoke about her new documentary project Whispers in May, showcased in the IDFA Forum and helmed by Dongnan Chen. The feature, produced by China’s Tail Bite Tail Films and Dutch outfit Muyi Film, follows Qinghua, a Yi ethnic teen, who sets out on a road trip with her two best friends to find a skirt for the menstruation rite of passage.

At IDFA 2024, we caught up with Renko Douze, producer of Tom Fassaert’s Forum project Between Brothers. The pic follows two elderly brothers - one a psychologist, the other a lifelong psychiatric patient - who set out to unravel the mystery of their father’s disappearance. Their son and nephew is filmmaker Fassaert, who joins them on a tragicomic road trip, untangling the roots of their inseparable bond. “Fassaert’s films are renowned for their emotional depth and intimacy,” Douze tells BDE.

The Eternal Soldier follows the story of the titular tragic figure who has fought and died in every war since the dawn of time, only to be resurrected again and again. “Our narrative device is to use a real telephone conversation between two opposing commanders in Chechnya as a central scene in the film and then to imagine their prior and subsequent lives, extending their stories all the way into eternity where they finally realise that they are in fact two sides of the same coin,” says producer Friedemann Hottenbacher.

Business Doc Europe spoke with Francesco Virga and Anna Di Toma of Doc/it during what is proving to be a frenetic IDFA for Italian docs. The country is represented by eight titles in the festival’s official selection, nine Docs for Sale titles, and four Forum projects. Virga and Di Toma focused on the Italian presence, the state of the country’s documentary scene, and Doc/its main activities at the Amsterdam-based gathering, among other topics.