16/10/2024 - The programme is out for the 37th edition of the world’s largest documentary film festival, which will open with Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero

During a press conference held on Tuesday 15 October, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) announced that Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero [+see also:
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interview: Piotr Winiewicz
film profile] will open the 2024 edition of the festival. The gathering’s abundant slate of 250 documentary titles will enliven the 37th edition, taking place in Amsterdam from 14-24 November.

Developed in IDFA’s DocLab R&D Program, the opening film challenges Werner Herzog’s assertion that “a computer won’t be able to create a film as good as mine for at least another 4,500 years”, and for this purpose, Winiewicz trained an AI system (called Kaspar) on Herzog’s oeuvre and asked it to generate a screenplay. The film stars Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps. In addition to About a Hero, this year’s International Competition includes a further 12 titles that “draw on and transcend deeply personal histories to reflect on our world today”, by established voices and first-time filmmakers. Eleven of them are world premieres. The European productions and co-productions are A Want in Her [+see also:
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interview: Myrid Carten
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interview: Maciej J Drygas
film profile] by Maciej J Drygas (Poland), The Golden Age [+see also:
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film profile] by Camilla Iannetti (Italy), The Guest by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz (Poland/Qatar), Green Is the New Red [+see also:
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interview: Anna Recalde Miranda
film profile] by Anna Recalde Miranda (France/Italy/Paraguay/Sweden), An American Pastoral by Auberi Edler (France), Writing Hawa [+see also:
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interview: Najiba Noori, Rasul Noori
film profile] by Najiba Noori (France/Netherlands/Qatar/Afghanistan), as well as Light Memories [+see also:
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film profile] by Misha Vallejo Prut (Colombia/Germany). There are two Dutch entries in the competition, Lidija Zelović’s Home Game [+see also:
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interview: Lidija Zelovic
film profile] and Luuk Bouwman's The Propagandist [+see also:
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film profile], and a Dutch minority co-production, She Dances by the Sea, by China's Jian Fan and Isabella Zang. Danae Elon's Rule of Stone [+see also:
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The Envision Competition, meanwhile, will offer “12 unparalleled films, each of them stylistically arresting, as visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages, venturing out of the box”. The European-produced or -coproduced documentaries included in this strand are Massimo D'Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries [+see also:
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interview: Martina Parenti and Massimo…
film profile] (Italy/Switzerland), already selected out of competition in this year's Venice Film Festival, Erik van Lieshout’s The Fen-fire (Netherlands), Eleonora Camizzi's Pictures in Mind [+see also:
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interview: Eleonora Camizzi
film profile] (Switzerland), Laurent Pantaleon's Garanti 100% Kréol (France) and Juan Carlos Donoso Gómez’s Huaquero (Ecuador/Peru/Romania). Iran's Higher than Acidic Clouds, a documentary by Ali Asgari (recently selected in Cannes' Un Certain Regard with his Terrestrial Verses and in Berlinale's Panorama with Until Tomorrow [+see also:
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film profile]), Cuba's Chronicles of the Absurd by Miguel Coyula, India's CycleMahesh by Suhel Banerjee, Lebanon's A Frown Gone Mad by Omar Mismar, Brazil's Paradise by Ana Rieper, Taiwan's Park by Yo-Hen So and Mexican-Uruguayan co-production Loss Adjustment by Miguel Calderón round off the selection.

As part of its premiere-only Luminous section, the festival has packed in a range of styles and formalist approaches across 23 titles, while the other premiere-only strand, Frontlight, includes 13 films examining the concept of truth and the urgent issues of today. “Filmmakers of various artistic sensibilities, ages, experiences, privileges and viewpoints have made films as singular as they are. It is a complex and rich image of a world in great pain, of a humanity that is fighting, resisting and still able to imagine a fairer future. It is a programme that defends documentary cinema better than ever before,” said IDFA’s artistic director, Orwa Nyrabia.

During the press conference, IDFA also announced the ten titles in its DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction, “which stretch new technologies to the limits of their potential in a non-fiction context”, as well as the 11 projects in the DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling, which “builds on the rich history of interactive storytelling with captivating works by both new talent and established names”. The non-competitive IDFA DocLab Spotlight section will include seven titles, “bringing award-winning VR projects, immersive theatre and an expanded offering of full-dome projects, affirming the latter as a flourishing stage for new media”.

Earlier this month, IDFA also announced the line-ups of its Short Documentary Competition, Youth Documentary Competition, Best of Fests and Signed sections, as well as a new section called Paradocs. Check out the full programme here.