It was with shock and dismay that we at IDFA received the news of the murder of Russian documentary film director and producer Alexander Rastorguev and his colleagues, journalist Orkhan Dzhemal and cameraman Kirill Radchenko, in the Central African Republic on July 31 while shooting a new documentary film there.
During the IDFAcademy Summer School, held July 2-7 in Amsterdam, up-and-coming international filmmaking talents from all over the world worked on their scripts or rough cuts under the guidance of esteemed film professionals.
Filmmaker Pawel Lozinski and editor Niels Pagh Andersen are two of the tutors at this year’s IDFAcademy Summer School. They will be joined by Gema Juárez Allen, Katja Dringenberg, Gitte Hansen, Aliona van der Horst, Menno Boerema and Jesper Osmund to give guidance to a select group of up-and-coming international filmmaking talents.
Op May 29 the AFEW Culture Initiative organises the first edition of PLOV: ARTxFOODxCINEMA. On this special evening the IDFA-film Debut will be screened, about eleven female Belarussian prisoners who are rehearsing for a theater play.
From April 26 So Help Me God will be screening in cinema's all over The Netherlands. A disconcerting and hilarious documentary about the Brussels judge Anne Gruwez.
Every third Sunday of the month Kriterion in Amsterdam screens one of the documentaries from the IDFA 2017 selection. This month it's In Praise of Nothing, a feelgood documentary about 'Nothing', a character that travels around the world and comments on everything.
Orwa Nyrabia (1977) is the new artistic director of IDFA. Nyrabia, who was born in Syria, is well-known in the documentary world as a producer, festival director, curator and mentor.
At the upcoming festival, IDFA is presenting the focus program Shifting Perspectives: The Arab World, which will zoom in on the image of the Arab world through the eyes of filmmaker from the region.
Last winter, the NFB, ARTE and IDFA launched a call for ideas out to digital creators around the world. Their mission? To create an interactive experience about mobility by exploiting the features of a smartphone. Today, we are revealing the ten winners who will spend the next couple of months creating these experiences. But first, a word from the jury...
Tune in this Friday for Update or Die, a one-day conference about interactive documentary preservation and future-proofing emerging digital forms, curated by MIT Open Documentary Lab and Phi Centre, in collaboration with IDFA DocLab.