Documentary Festival IDFA to Open With ‘White Tiger Column’

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world’s leading documentary festival, has unveiled the main competition lineups for the 39th edition, which runs from Nov. 12 to 22. “White Tiger Column” opens the event, at which 253 titles from 80 countries will screen.

Newly unveiled selections include the International and Envision Competitions, Luminous, Frontlight and the IDFA DocLab competition selections, and the nominations for all cross-section awards.

Opening film
IDFA opens with the world premiere of “White Tiger Column” by Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi and Bryan Dickie, following a group of recruits through 45 days of training with Myanmar’s resistance movement. In a training camp deep in the jungle, the filmmakers capture the daily lives of young volunteers as they prepare to fight for their freedom.

“White Tiger Column” has been selected for the International Competition and nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature.

International Competition
The International Competition brings together works that “invite curiosity and critical reflection on our world today,” IDFA said. The selection of 13 titles brings together established veteran voices next to first-time filmmakers, with 12 films presenting their world or international premieres.

Envision Competition
The Envision Competition offers “13 unparalleled films, each of them stylistically arresting, as visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages,” the festival said.

“The selection brings together titles in which form drives the narrative. Through distinctive visual approaches and formal choices, the filmmakers deconstruct and reframe the complexities of our world, offering new ways of seeing and understanding the subjects they explore.”

Luminous
The premiere-only section Luminous presents “a wide range of styles and formalist approaches, from observational to personal to experimental. Across both feature-length and short films, the titles grapple with big questions of life through deeply personal, lived experiences,” IDFA said.

Among the selection of 21 films, 19 titles are world or international premieres, including nine debut feature films.

In the immersive and poetic “Where the Sun Is Born” by Laura Bermúdez and Jorge García, a dancer leaves the city in Honduras to travel back to the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna community of his youth—in search of his roots and a sense of community.

The IDFA Bertha Fund-supported “She Was Not Alone” by Hussein Al-asadi closely follows Zaira, an elderly woman living in close communion with nature in the marshlands of southern Iraq—meditatively illuminating an idyllic place, increasingly under threat.

In the IDFA Project Space NL alumni Raluca Lupaşcu’s “A Modern Roma Fairytale,” 10-year-old Nicoleta, granddaughter of a Roma king, grows up dreaming of a life in a marble palace—while watching the women around her navigate the restrictions of the patriarchal traditions that will shape her future.

In “Every Death Diminishes Me,” Sergii Bazhenov trains as a medic to join the front lines, documenting his colleagues as they treat the wounded and confront the human cost of war.

Frontlight
The premiere-only section Frontlight showcases 16 films, from “critically examinations of the truth and urgent issues of our time to portraits of artists and their work.” Fifteen of the selected titles are world or international premieres.

“Several films offer immediate responses to critical current events, while others take time to reflect, examining the social realities and challenges shaping people’s lives,” IDFA said.

“The Big Boom!” by Gabriel Tejedor explores a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Kazanlak, rife with contradictions and simmering tension, where the machine guns and rockets are destined for Ukraine while many of its employees are pro-Putin.

In “No Man’s Air” by Peter Delpeut and Gerco de Ruijter, a pilot recalls the last flight to Nicosia Airport in July 1974, as a Turkish invasion of Cyprus loomed.

Afsaneh Salari’s “Tehran, Under the Skin” enters Tehran’s cosmetic clinics to explore the pressures behind Iran’s widespread culture of cosmetic surgery in pursuit of physical perfection, in a conservative society that seeks to control women’s beauty.

In “Jenin & the Nakba Between Us,” Serene Husni returns to her parents’ hometown in the occupied West Bank, weaving family archive and conversations with residents into a portrait of a place shaped by displacement, occupation and memory.

Additions to the program
Tuesday’s program announcement also included additions to the Signed, Dead Angle: Common Ground, IDFA DocLab Spotlight, Best of Fests and Special Screenings selections.

Recent additions to Signed include Alex Gibney’s “Musk,” an incisive look at the power and influence of Elon Musk; Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s “You Can See Everything,” a complex portrait of notorious Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes; and “Sixteen Moments of My Life” by Albert Serra, spotlighting Ingrid Caven singing live at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.

The Special Screenings section brings an Eye Filmmuseum restoration of John Leerdam’s “30 mei, 1969 (gritu di un pueblo),” that revisits the historic uprising in Curaçao and the colonial inequalities and racial discrimination that fuelled it.

The IDFA DocLab Spotlight selection announces several titles, including “In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats,” Darren Emerson’s landmark VR experience (IDFA, 2022) revisiting Britain’s late-1980s rave scene, presented in a new collective, multi-user format for DocLab’s 20th anniversary.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction
With 10 titles, the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction boldly expands the horizons of the documentary genre, pushing immersive media beyond conventional boundaries. Across VR, live theater performances, full-dome experiences, and multisensory works, the selection “explores how immersive art can alter the way we encounter reality—offering unexpected perspectives and opening up new possibilities for agency and resistance,” IDFA said.

“Several artists use immersive experiences to bring audiences into close, embodied encounters with realities that may otherwise feel distant. Other works deal with the corporeal and the body, from digitally altering our perception of ourselves and inviting our microbiomes to a feast, to examining grief through magnifying the decomposition of a loved one’s body—turning grief and death into a profound reflection on how humans are but a part of a larger ecosystem,” the festival said.

IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling
The nine-title IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling expands the possibilities of documentary through digital art, games, interactive installations, and live performance. With artists from across disciplines bringing traditional forms into dialogue with new media, the selection showcases a new wave of cross-disciplinary experimentation.

“Several works confront the digital systems shaping contemporary life, subverting algorithms and finding room for human error and agency. Other works invite audiences into interactive open worlds, adapting game and world-building technologies to create participatory experiences that radically depart from everyday reality. Elsewhere, artists explore the ever-evolving relationship between the physical and digital, investigating how technology fundamentally shapes our experience of intimacy, desire, and connection,” IDFA said.

Cross-section awards
IDFA has also announced the nominations for the cross-section awards—distinct awards that “transcend the program sections to recognize outstanding artistic achievement across the festival program.”

The IDFA Award for Best First Feature “celebrates the most remarkable debut feature-length films, recognizing works that reveal a distinctive creative voice and the promise of an evolving signature.”

Drawn from the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous and Frontlight, the award is accompanied by a €5,000 prize, awarded by an international jury.

The films nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature are also eligible for the FIPRESCI Award, chosen by an international jury of film critics.

The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film highlights exceptional Dutch filmmaking talent across the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous and Frontlight selections. The winning filmmaker with receive €5,000, awarded by an international jury.

The Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award for Best Creative Use of Archive honors outstanding archival film, selected from across the film program. The winning film will receive a €5,000 prize, awarded by an international jury.

The winners will be announced during the IDFA awards ceremony on Nov. 19.