Idfa 2013
It’s one festival after the other publishing its programme. Lisbon, Leipzig, Amsterdam and today there is a programme party in Copenhagen for cph:dox…
Idfa programme yesterday, the biggest festival in audience numbers and considered to be the most important – this is where all documentary filmmakers wish to have their films shown, and where all professionals have to be for the industry activities, first of all the forum. If you are not there, colleagues might think that you have stopped making documentaries or your company has closed…
It is amazing and overwhelming – take a look at the second link below, 7 competition programmes and 15 (fifteen!) side programmes. Rithy Panh makes the Top Ten according to his personal choice, great films like ”Don’t Look Back” (Pennebaker), Joris Ivens ”A Tale of the Wind”, Pedro Costa’s ”In Vanda’s Room” and a pearl, forgotten by most people: ”Farrebique – the Four Seasons” from1946 by Georges Rouquier.
For historical interested there is this gift: “Next year is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. To mark this occasion, eight documentaries dealing with World War I will screen at the upcoming IDFA. These are films made between 1917 and 1928 and come from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK. The selection was made with researcher David Barnouw of the NIOD, media historian Bert Hogenkamp of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and silent film conservator at EYE Elif Rongen-Kaynakci. The films will be introduced by experts and after the screening, discussions will take place with the audience on the meaning of the films in a historical context.”
Competition for feature length documentaries, 15 films, let me mention 3 of them that I know about: “Life Almost Wonderful” by Bulgarian Svetoslav Draganov, “Return to Homs” by Talal Derki and “The Wild Years” by Ventura Durall (PHOTO).