Ukrainian-Russian filmmaker and anti-Putin activist Vitaly Mansky will be returning to IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) with his short film The Iron, a portrait of Europe in wartime, which screens in the festival’s competition for short documentary.
Mansky’s documentary portait of former leader of the Soviet Union Gorbachev. Heaven previously played in competition at IDFA in 2020.
Also in the short documentary section, Theo Panagopoulos’s archive-based doc Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing celebrates Palestine’s floral splendour from the 1930s, showing the complex relationship between the land and its inhabitants.
The same section will feature Pat Heywood’s mixed media project, Tough Love, and stop-motion animation Mama Micra by Rebecca Blöcher, exploring how far people are willing to go to quench their thirst for personal freedom.
Filmmaker Niki Padidar is again overseeing the IDFA competition for youth documentary. Among the titles selected are Tabarak Allah Abbas’s My Homeland which uses animation to tell the story of how her parents overcame fleeing Iraq, and Camille Vigny’s Crushed, a young girl’s love story recounted in an unusual way.
Several big name auteurs feature in the festival’s Signed sidebar which includes Mati Diop’s Berlinale winner, Dahomey.
Meanwhile, fresh from its screenings in Locarno, Radu Jude’s two new docs, found-footage documentary Eight Postcards From Utopia, showing the commercials from Romania’s transition to a capitalist democracy, and Sleep #2, capturing live stream recordings of Andy Warhol’s grave, will both be showing.
On the music front, Andrei Ujică’s long gestating 1965-based TWST – Things We Said Today, about the The Beatles as they captivate New York while the Watts riots erupt in Los Angeles, and Kevin Macdonald’s archive-based One to One: John & Yoko, are also screening.
Best Of Fests includes such titles as Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries documenting her search for justice in the face of a Japanese culture of silence following her own sexual assault from a high profile offender. Following the discovery of unmarked graves near an indigenous reserve, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane reveal a long history of abuse and neglect of indigenous children in Canadian state-led boarding schools.
Another very prominent title, the IDFA Bertha Fund backed No Other Land by Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balal, Rachel Szor, and Basel Adra, about the ceaseless Israeli attacks on a network of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, will also be showing.
Among the experimental doc titles showcased in Paradox’s is Oleh Sentsov’s trench-based Ukraine war doc, Real, which premiered at Karlovy Vary.
The full selection will be announced in October. IDFA runs from November 14-24.
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