IDFA Starts Today/1
The without any doubt biggest in audience and most important documentary film festival for the professional community kicks off today in Amsterdam and goes on until November 28. Edition number 23 it is, that will welcome an audience with more than 100.000 spectators in numbers, and around 2000 guests. A text clip from the site:
”Amsterdam will be home to the international documentary world until Sunday 28 November. As well as the more than 300 documentaries on the program, there will be 450 Q&As after the screenings and three debates… Around 2000 national and international guests will be attending IDFA over the coming week and a half. As well as being the place where documentary directors come together, IDFA’s FORUM and Docs for Sale marketplaces also make the festival a meeting place for film buyers, festival programmers, producers, commissioning editors and other documentary professionals from home and abroad.”
The opening galla screening is tonight, ”Position among the Stars” by Leonard Retel Helmrich, his third part of a trilogy on a family in Indonesia, but the audience can already from this morning go to the cinema and discover what is new and/or enjoy old masters. We have earlier on written about the selection of the Top 10 of Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo to be screened at the festival – this is of course followed by a retrospective of the director’s masterpieces like ”Tanjuska and the 7 Devils”, ”Atman”, ”Mysterion” and ”3 Rooms of Melancholia” (PHOTO). A very well deserved hommage to a true auteur in world documentary film. She does not like films to be watched on small screens, dvd or online – but I dare to recommend that if you google her name and titles you will get many possibilities to get hold of them, including (for our Danish readers ”3 Rooms of Melancholia”) the public library lending system.
