Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan has been asked by IDFA to program a personal Top Ten List of his favorite films for this year's event. Sivan is in Amsterdam for the premiere of his latest film Jaffa, The Orange Clockwork, which screens in the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentaries. During the festival, Sivan will also present a masterclass in which he will explain his choices for his list.
Eyal Sivan grew up in Jerusalem and worked as a photograp...
If you are an industry professional who works in the world of documentaries, it is a pretty sure bet that you are spending this week in Amsterdam at the IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Aside from the hundreds of completed films on display, the Festival sponsors a co-production market for filmmakers to network with potential financiers and distributors for new projects (that will most probably come to IDFA next year as completed films).
IDFA’s annual c...
Dutch cinema circuit Pathé Netherlands, a long-time collaborator with IDFA through its Tuschinski and Munt theaters which host many of the festival’s events and screenings, is launching a new documentary label called Pathé Docs, aimed at bringing documentaries to a wider audience.
The label, which has been devised in close collaboration with IDFA, will go live during the festival with the screening of three IDFA titles – Icelandic eco-doc Dreamland, Michael Moore’s C...
Getting a prize at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, can be of major significance to a documentary film at the start of its long journey through the Festival circuit and, hopefully, to theatrical, television and ancillary distribution. The Festival's imprimatur is highly regarded and respected in the world of programmers and festival directors, who are here in Amsterdam scouring for the best in non-fiction film.
Here is the first part of the films compet...
The American documentary U.N. ME, a lacerating look at the inefficiencies of the United Nations, has its word premiere at the IDFA International Documentary Festival Amsterdam this week. In a film that exposes the incompetence and corruption at the heart of the United Nations, filmmakers Ami Horowitz and Matthew Groff show how an organization created to ennoble mankind now actually enables evil and sows global chaos.
When the United Nations was founded more than sixty yea...
Veteran documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman was honored at IDFA's Opening Night ceremonies last evening with a Living Legends Award. There is much truth in the name of the award......Wiseman is a true living legend who continues his 50-year streak of creating intriguing, involving and sometimes shocking documentaries at the tender age of 79. He shows no signs of slowing down. His lastest project, LA DANSE, a portrait of the Ballet Company of the French National Opera. Frederick Wiseman was b...
One could call it a documentary deluge.......IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world's largest event devoted to the non-fiction form, is expecting over 2000 international guests over the next 10 days. If you are in and into docs, Amsterdam is ground zero for film premieres, special events, chic parties and industry seminars and networking sessions. The Festival has clocked in some 2200 accredited guests from The Netherlands and around the world to attend the 22nd I...
Veteran documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman was honored at IDFA's Opening Night ceremonies last evening with a Living Legends Award. There is much truth in the name of the award......Wiseman is a true living legend who continues his 50-year streak of creating intriguing, involving and sometimes shocking documentaries at the tender age of 79. He shows no signs of slowing down. His lastest project, LA DANSE, a portrait of the Ballet Company of the French National Opera.
Freder...
One could call it a documentary deluge.......IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world's largest event devoted to the non-fiction form, is expecting over 2000 international guests over the next 10 days. If you are in and into docs, Amsterdam is ground zero for film premieres, special events, chic parties and industry seminars and networking sessions.
The Festival has clocked in some 2200 accredited guests from The Netherlands and around the world to at...
The world of documentary film has descended on the city of Amsterdam for IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world's largest and most diverse showcase of non-fiction film from around the world. With documentaries showing muscle at the theatrical box office, as well as providing a well of programming for new electronic distribution formats, the hunger for the real is greater than ever. By offering a diverse program of film premieres, special...
Sunday, November 30--------IDFA came to a smashing and glamorous climax last evening at the IDFA Awards Ceremony. Winning the Joris Ivens Competition, the Festival's most prestigious prize, was Burma VJ--Reporting From A Closed Country by Danish director Anders Ostergaard. The film is a gripping chronicle of the 2007 uprising by Burmese monks, which creates a political and religious crisis in a country that is viewed as the most repressive regime on earth. Nearly all the footage in this fascin...
Saturday, November 29-----As IDFA began to wind down in anticipation of its Awards Gala this evening, here are some bits and pieces announced or experienced in the past week:
CROSS MEDIA PROJECTS AT IDFA FORUM
In addition to the traditional documentaries that were pitched at the IDFA Forum this past week, three projects were invited that deliberately cross media. Thee include the ambitious 24berlin-A Day In The Life, marking the 20th anniversary of the fa...
Saturday, November 29---------One of the pleasures for me in attending the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the theatrical experience of viewing "serious cinema" in a plush environment. With its move last year to the Rembrandtplein, IDFA has been able to license two of Amsterdam's premiere theaters: the art deco movie palace the Tuschinski and the modern multiplex Pathe Munt. Both theaters offer a widescreen and "big" presentation of what is often...
Burma VJ (Denmark/Sweden/England/Norway
Friday, November 28-------As IDFA enters its final weekend, the front runners in the various competition categories have been announced. At the nightly IDFA Talks, an assembly of filmmakers, producers, programmers and IDFA staff anxiously awaited the announcements of the final nominees in the main Festival competitions. The list is included below, with information on the award winners coming soon on this blog.
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Thursday, November 27-----While the accent at IDFA is on the new crop of documentaries being created around the world, there is also a healthy respect for career retrospectives to showcase for both filmmakers and audiences alike the themes and techniques of earlier non-fiction masters.
At this year’s event, the Festival is presenting two such retrospectives. 110 Years of Joris Ivens, named for the most famous Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens, is celebrating the 110th birthday of th...
Thursday, November 27------Yesterday saw the close of one of IDFA’s most important professional ventures, the Forum for International Co-Financing of Documentaries. IDFA organized the first Forum in 1993 and has seen the event grow in stature, number of projects and interest from film and television funders and programmers. The original aim was to establish an international network that would facilitate contact between independent documentary producers and television broadcasters. This has e...
Wednesday, November 26-----I arrived at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam yesterday to find….an event very much in full swing. The Festival had, in fact, opened the Thursday before, so the hundreds of international visitors who have descended to Amsterdam were already fully oriented. I’ve attended IDFA several times in the past, but this is the first time since it fully relocated from its traditional location on the Leidseplein to the more upscale surroundings of the Re...
Yesterday saw the close of one of IDFA’s most important professional ventures, the Forum for International Co-Financing of Documentaries. IDFA organized the first Forum in 1993 and has seen the event grow in stature, number of projects and interest from film and television funders and programmers. The original aim was to establish an international network that would facilitate contact between independent documentary producers and television broadcasters. This has expanded to include internatio...
A new addition to this year's IDFA is the introduction of Doclab, a new program section that explores the relationship between new media and the documentary form. The main theme for this year is data visualisation. In all modern cultures, a dizzying amount of information is compiled by government bodies, market researchers and large companies like Google. In aggregate, this data offers an accurate if exhausting account of our collective daily comings and going. The amount of data available is ...
As part of the parallel Amsterdam India Festival, IDFA is presenting a program it calls East Side Stories, featuring 17 contemporary documentaries from India. This unique look at the emerging documentary movement in one of Asia's most complex and thriving cultures offers a rare look at different aspects of this fascinating region, a country in transition trying to balance its age-old traditions with its new status of economic development and increased international clout. However, the economic...
Tuesday, November 25------As part of the parallel Amsterdam India Festival, IDFA is presenting a program it calls East Side Stories, featuring 17 contemporary documentaries from India. This unique look at the emerging documentary movement in one of Asia's most complex and thriving cultures offers a rare look at different aspects of this fascinating region, a country in transition trying to balance its age-old traditions with its new status of economic development and increased international cl...
Monday, November 24--------A new addition to this year's IDFA is the introduction of Doclab, a new program section that explores the relationship between new media and the documentary form. The main theme for this year is data visualisation.
In all modern cultures, a dizzying amount of information is compiled by government bodies, market researchers and large companies like Google. In aggregate, this data offers an accurate if exhausting account of our colle...
Sunday, November 23-----Making its international premiere at IDFA this weekend is the Peruvian documentary Lucanamarca. The film tells the intriguing and disturbing story of the 1983 massacre of 69 residents of the remote village of Lucanamarca, who were brutally murdered by members of the Maoist guerrilla movement known as Shining Path. Among the victims were numerous women and children. The bloodbath was an act of retaliation for the murder of one of the movement's leaders and the first in a...
Saturday, November 22-----Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov is due in town today to attend the screening of In The Holy Fire Of Revolution, Masha Novikova’s film about the daily harassment of opposition political leaders in Putin’s Russia.
Kasparov was a major international chess champion who won every possible award in the game over a career that spanned nearly 20 years. However, his post-chess campaign for human rights has made him one of Russia's...
Our Daily Bread
Friday, November 21---------IDFA has selected Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter to present the annual Top Ten program at this year's Festival. As part of the program, Geyrhalter will present a few of his own films and other documentaries that have influenced him.
Among those Geyrhalter films being showcased are Pripyat (1999), which won the Diagonale Grand Prize Award at the Diagonale Film Festival, as well as the SCAM Award at...
