IDFA Announces First Wave of Documentary Programming, Plus Guest of Honor

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam — or IDFA — has unveiled its first wave of programming and named its guest of honor for 2024. The edition, the festival’s 37th, runs November 14 through 24.

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Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez will be IDFA’s guest of honor. Grimonprez first gained international acclaim for his 1997 film “Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y,” about the media’s part in shaping the public perception of airplane hijackings. His latest film, “ Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat ,” looks at Congo’s decolonization through the smokescreen of jazz as protest. Other films screening as part of the Grimonprez retrospective will include “Double Take” (2009), “Shadow World” (2016), and “Blue Orchids” (2017). The program will include an extended talk with Grimonprez.

This edition of IDFA will also introduce the multi-year curated program titled Dead Angle, which uses documentary storytelling to illuminate cultural blind spots past and present. This year, the program looks at borders of both the metaphoric and physical varieties.

Among confirmed titles is “The Great Wall” by Tadhg O’Sullivan, an essay film that maps the borders around Europe in light of the migration crisis, based on a short story by Franz Kafka. In “Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel” by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, the Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers travel along the 1967 partition lines that divided Palestine, exploring how its people were separated from their neighbors.

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In the “Spotlight on Cuba” program of 19 films, audiences are invited to revisit Cuba’s rich political history. With a retrospective of the pioneering Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez, next to films made by students of the EICTV (The International Film and TV School of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba), the program will explore the paradoxes of our perception of Cuba as both revolutionary utopia and dystopia.

Meanwhile, with its most collaborative edition to date, the IDFA on Stage selection presents an interdisciplinary program of live cinema events. Bridging film, new media, and the
performing arts, highlights include two projects presented together with IDFA DocLab — the
innovative performance “Thanks for Being Here” by Belgian theater group Ontroerend Goed,
presented together with De Brakke Grond, and live performance “Drinking Brecht: An Automated Laboratory Performance” by New York- and Istanbul-based artist Sister Sylvester, which puts a spotlight on microbiology.

The final competition titles and full program will be announced on Tuesday, October 15. Head to IDFA’s website for more details .