IDFA 2023

The winners of IDFA's 36th edition competition programs were announced November 16. 1489 (Armenia) by Shoghakat Vardanyan won the IDFA Award for Best Film. The award is accompanied by a €15,000 cash prize. Ariel Kuaray Ortega and Ernesto de Carvalho won the IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition for Canuto’s Transformation (Brazil). The award is also accompanied by a €15,000 cash prize. All winners…

Italian producer Edoardo Fracchia explains his collaboration with Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri on her dynamic debut feature doc Amor. “We had a deal: to find a compromise between her experimental, short-orientated mode of filmmaking and my experience on working on more popular, mainstream features. [The idea was] to create an intelligible project, which could attract financing but still be ambitious.”

Louisiana Mees-Fongang’s feature doc debut concerns 15 unaccompanied minors living in a community centre who arrived in Belgium as refugees. “Part of their reality is complex and hard. They had tough moments. But, at the same time, they’re young, active and full of energy and potential. This is also something I really found important to show,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

Vita Maria Drygas’ Danger Zone is described as “a front-row, unfiltered, look at the global war tourism industry,” a film in which its subjects prefer being in the most lethal conflict zones to lounging on the beach. “The most important thing that drove me to the subject, it wasn’t to tell the story of these particular characters. I really thought it was more universal - that the subject shows the condition of our world. It was for me like a mirror of our times,” Drygas tells BDE.

Documentary sales powerhouse Autlook arrives at IDFA with a mix of world premieres and titles screening in Best of Fests. Among the latter are two docs in this year’s race for the International Oscar, Asmae El Moudir’s Cannes hit The Mother of All Lies (representing Morocco) and Estonian hopeful Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (which has already won Anna Hints a Directing Award at Sundance). Autlook boss Salma Abdalla talks to BDE.

The Guest of Honour this year was Chinese auteur Wang Bing. In Amsterdam the  director was celebrated with a dedicated retrospective showcasing six of his films, including Youth (Spring), Man in Black and Mrs. Fang, a Top 10 programme and a one-on-one conversation with Orwa Nyrabia that zoomed in on his career and body of work.

At IDFA, BDE caught up with Ted Hope, one of the towering figures of US indie film over the last 30 years and producer of Invisible Nation, directed by his partner Vanessa Hope and about Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen. He discussed the new film as well as his career to date, including his time as head of production at Amazon Original Movies. “If I had to say what did I do really well in my time at Amazon, I’d say it was to fight for time for the filmmakers. Every time we did that, it made the movie better.”

Beautifully composed and superbly edited, the film portrays one of the last crop farmers in The Netherlands, plying his trade in the shadow of giant multinationals. The effect of the documentary is profound. You want to share this rare gem of a man, his philosophy and life, with as many people as possible, but at the same time keep himto yourself, cherish him and guard him.

Director Guillermo Asensio and executive producer Emma Darby talk to Business Doc Europe about their highly cinematic and meditative portrait of renowned Taiwanese/Scottish potter Nancy Fuller, set in the highlands of Scotland. “It as an antidote to the hyper-accelerated, hyper-stimulated and very turbulent world that we live in,” says Darby. “It's an ode to beauty, stillness, and nature.”

In visually breathtaking fashion, and full of wonderful, human, slightly absurdist observations, As the Tide Comes In tells the story of the Danish Wadden Island of Mandø through Gregers, the last farmer resident. At the same time, it is - inevitably - a story about climate change and humankind’s fight for and against nature.