IDFA Documentary Festival Will Open with ‘White Tiger Column’

Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, the world’s leading documentary festival, announced the main competition programs that will be held for the 39th time between 12-22 November. The “White Tiger Column” opens the event, where 253 films from 80 countries will be screened.

Newly announced selections include nominations for the International and Envision Competitions, Luminous, Frontlight and IDFA DocLab competition selections, and all cross-sectional awards.

opening movie
IDFA opens with the world premiere of Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi and Bryan Dickie’s “White Tiger Column” after a group of recruits undergo 45 days of training in the Myanmar resistance movement. At a training camp deep in the forest, the filmmakers capture the daily lives of young volunteers as they prepare to fight for their freedom.

“White Tiger Column” was selected for the International Competition and nominated for the IDFA Best First Feature Award.

International Competition
IDFA said the International Competition brings together works that “invite curiosity and critical thinking about today’s world.” The selection of 13 films brings together well-established experienced voices as well as first-time filmmakers, with 12 films having their world or international premieres.

Imagine the Competition
The festival stated that the Envision Competition offers “13 unique films, each stylistically remarkable, where visionary filmmakers create new cinematic languages.”

“The selection brings together titles where form drives narrative. Through different visual approaches and formal choices, filmmakers deconstruct and reframe the complexities of our world, offering new ways to see and understand the subjects they explore.”

Bright
IDFA said the premiere-only episode, Luminous, “offers a wide range of styles and formalist approaches, from the observational to the personal to the experimental. In both features and shorts, the titles grapple with life’s big questions through deeply personal, lived experiences.”

Among the 21 films, 19 are world or international premieres, and nine of them are first feature films.

In Laura Bermúdez and Jorge García’s gripping and poetic “Where the Sun Rises,” a dancer leaves the city in Honduras to return to the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna community of her youth in search of her roots and sense of community.

Hussein Al-asadi’s IDFA Bertha Fund-supported work “She Was Not Alone” closely follows Zaira, an old woman who lives in close communion with nature in the swamps of southern Iraq, illuminating through meditation an idyllic place that is increasingly under threat.

In the film “A Modern Roman Tale” by IDFA Project Space NL graduate Raluca Lupaşcu, 10-year-old Nicoleta, the granddaughter of a Roman king, grows up dreaming of living in a marble palace and watches the women around her overcome the restrictions of patriarchal traditions that will shape her future.

In his book “Every Death Makes Me Weaker,” Sergii Bazhenov trains as a medic to join the front lines and documents his colleagues as they treat the wounded and confront the human cost of war.

front light
The premiere-only section, Frontlight, showcases 16 films “from critical examinations of reality and pressing issues of our time to portraits and works of artists.” Fifteen of the selected films are world-wide or international premieres.

“While some films provide immediate reactions to critical current events, others take time to reflect, examining the social realities and challenges that shape people’s lives,” IDFA said.

“Big Bang!” By Gabriel Tejedor investigates a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Kazanlak, a city full of contradictions and growing tensions, where machine guns and rockets are sent to Ukraine, where many of its employees are pro-Putin.

In the movie “No Man’s Air” by Peter Delpeut and Gerco de Ruijter, a pilot recalls the last flight to Nicosia Airport in July 1974, as the Turkish invasion of Cyprus approached.

Afsaneh Salari’s “Tehran, Under the Skin” delves into Tehran’s cosmetic clinics to explore the pressures behind Iran’s pervasive culture of plastic surgery in the pursuit of physical perfection in a conservative society that seeks to control women’s beauty.

In “Fetus and the Nakba Between Us,” Serene Husni returns to her parents’ hometown in the occupied West Bank and transforms the family archive and conversations with residents into a portrait of a place shaped by displacement, occupation, and memories.

Additions to the program
Tuesday’s lineup announcement also included additions to the Autographed, Dead Angle: Common Ground, IDFA DocLab Spotlight, Best of Festivals and Special Screenings selections.

Recent additions to Signed include Alex Gibney’s “Musk,” a searing look at the power and influence of Elon Musk; “You Can See Everything,” directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, is a complex portrait of Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of Theranos; and Albert Serra’s “Sixteen Moments of My Life,” which highlights Ingrid Caven singing live at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

The Special Screenings section presents the Eye Filmmuseum restoration of John Leerdam’s “30 mei, 1969 (gritu di un pueblo),” which revisits the historic uprising in Curaçao and the colonial inequalities and racial discrimination that fueled it.

The IDFA DocLab Spotlight selection announces a variety of titles, including Darren Emerson’s landmark VR experience (IDFA, 2022) “On the Trail of Repetitive Beats”, which revisits Britain’s late 1980s rave scene, available in a new collective, multi-user format for DocLab’s 20th anniversary.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Nonfiction
The IDFA DocLab Immersive Nonfiction Competition boldly expands the horizons of the documentary genre with 10 titles, pushing immersive media beyond traditional boundaries. Through virtual reality, live theater performances, full dome experiences and multi-sensory works, IDFA “explores how immersive art can transform the way we encounter reality, offering unexpected perspectives and creating new possibilities for agency and resistance,” IDFA said.

“Several artists use immersive experiences to engage audiences in intimate, embodied encounters with realities that might otherwise feel distant. Other works engage the corporeal and the body, from digitally altering our perception of ourselves and inviting our microbiomes to a feast, to examining grief by magnifying the decomposition of a loved one’s body, to transforming grief and death into a profound reflection on how humans are part of a larger ecosystem,” the festival said.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling
The nine-title IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling Competition expands the possibilities of documentary through digital art, games, interactive installations and live performance. The selection, in which artists from different disciplines bring traditional forms into dialogue with new media, showcases a new wave of interdisciplinary experimentation.

IDFA states, “Many works confront the digital systems that shape contemporary life, subverting algorithms and making room for human error and agency. Other works invite viewers into interactive open worlds, adapting gaming and world-building technologies to create participatory experiences that depart radically from everyday reality. Elsewhere, artists explore the ever-evolving relationship between the physical and the digital, exploring how technology fundamentally shapes our experience of intimacy, desire and connection.”

Section rewards
IDFA also announced nominations for cross-sectional awards, which are distinct awards that “transcend program sections to recognize outstanding artistic achievement in the festival program.”

The IDFA Best First Feature Award “celebrates the most remarkable debut features, recognizing works that demonstrate a distinct creative voice and the promise of an evolving signature.”

The prize from the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous and Frontlight is accompanied by a €5,000 prize awarded by an international jury.

Films nominated for the IDFA Best First Feature Award are also nominated for the FIPRESCI Award, selected by an international jury of film critics.

The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film highlights outstanding Dutch filmmaking talent in the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous and Frontlight selections. The winning filmmaker will receive a prize of 5,000 Euros, awarded by an international jury.

The Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award for Best Creative Use of Archive recognizes outstanding archival films selected from the film program. The winning film will receive a prize of 5,000 Euros, awarded by an international jury.

Winners will be announced at the IDFA awards ceremony on November 19.