News

With Sundance Film Festival kicking off, we wish a warm congratulations to the five films we supported that are now premiering in competition, as well as international festival hit Collective in non-premiere section Spotlight. Whether these titles received funding through the IDFA Bertha Fund, workshopped with esteemed tutors at IDFAcademy Summer School, or found co-financing or co-production partners at IDFA Forum, all are close to our hearts. Read more about each of these films’ histories at IDFA below. …

Our annual talent development program is open to emerging filmmakers looking to elevate their script or rough cut. Submit your application by February 20, 2020. …

IDFA in Kriterion is Back! Every month from now, Kriterion in Amsterdam will screen one of the documentaries from the IDFA 2019 selection. This month's pick is Scheme Birds, a candid coming-of-age documentary about the lives of a group of youngsters in Motherwell, Scotland.…

For many years now, we've partnered with Melkweg to bring you the most electrifying stories about music. On Sunday, January 19, the series continues. Come watch three of the best music documentaries from IDFA 2019, plus a screening of D.A. Pennebaker's classic Monterey Pop.…

During IDFA 2019, we organized the IDFA Industry Talk Filming 'the other'; entitlement or privilege?, which gathered international filmmakers to elaborate on awareness, gaze and entitlement in documentary filmmaking. Among the speakers was Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza, whose latest film Europa, "Based on a True Story" world-premiered at the festival in our feature-length competition. After the Talk, we caught up with Ruhorahoza to discuss the representation of marginalized communities and, through making a film in the UK, his efforts to claim the same privilege that Western filmmakers take when making films in the Global South. Read the interview here.…

This past Friday at Santiago’s Chile Conecta, Chilean filmmaker Nicolás Tabilo took home the IDFA Award for most promising project for his feature-length documentary project Imágenes a la deriva (Drifting Images). The 80-minute, highly personal film project centers on the waterways of the filmmaker's hometown as a signifier of trauma, memory, and the search for closure. …

IDFA in Kriterion is Back! Every month from now, Kriterion in Amsterdam will screen one of the documentaries from the IDFA 2019 selection. This month it's Searching Eva, an unconventional inside view of the equally unconventional life of Eva: sex worker, writer, musician, model, blogger, anarchist and feminist. After the screening, we will be joined by Velvet December from Proud Nederland for a Q&A.…

With a two-film program, IDFA shined a spotlight on Venezuelan filmmakers, whose country is in the grips of a humanitarian crisis.…

Towards the end of the festival, we caught up with Guest of Honor Patricio Guzmán as he looked back on a week filled with memories—of his own films and the ten favorites he selected.…

William Uricchio is one of the world's top media scholars, a professor of comparative media studies at MIT, and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University. At MIT, Uricchio is the founder and principal investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, a close collaborator of the IDFA DocLab Research & Development Program. We talked to Uricchio about his research with DocLab, the nature and development of new digital media as well as their relationship with traditional forms of expression, and the cultural and technological trends in the field that we can expect in the coming years.…