IDFA 2022 opens on 9 November with the world premiere of All You See by Niki Padidar. Contemplating questions of what it means to belong, who gets excluded, and how outsider status is continually reaffirmed, Padidar’s multi-layered feature powerfully foregrounds the sensation of being looked at. Honest, painful and even humorous encounters with three other immigrants to the Netherlands are stylistically interwoven between Padidar’s own personal history, opening up a vulnerable space of articulation with global resonance. A confessional collage with no simple outs, All You See turns the spotlight on all of us, while simultaneously asking: who is “us”?
Guest of Honor
Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras will be honored at IDFA with a Retrospective and Top 10.
Focus program Around Masculinity
From the alpha male to toxic masculinity, the focus program interrogates the problematic social construct that is masculinity from a variety of perspectives. The curated section homes in on a blind spot in film history, inviting audiences to take a hard look at their heroes by re-reading classics such as Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and the Maysles Brothers’ Meet Marlon Brando. Fragility comes to the fore in Heddy Honigmann’s Crazy, as do the inherent paradoxes of masculinity in Pirjo Honkasalo’s The 3 Rooms of Melancholia.
Focus program: Playing Reality
Bringing the drama of documentary film centre stage, the titles in this focus program creatively reimagine the concept of theatricality. Clio Bernard’s The Arbor, on renowned playwright Andrea Dunbar, showcases the performativity of language and voice. Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly iconically uses re-enactment as a documentary film instrument, while Lola Arias’ Theatre of War experiments with mise-en-scène as its protagonists revisit memories of the Falklands War. Eduardo Coutinho’s Moscow, on the other hand, deals directly with the physical space of the theater. Playing Reality is the result of a special collaboration between IDFA and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). There are several competition programs throughout IDFA, of which the International and Envision Competition are the main competitions.
IDFA DocLab theme: Nervous Systems
With the theme Nervous Systems, IDFA’s new media section returns to the heart of Amsterdam for 10 days of digital and XR programming. DocLab VR projects and installations can be visited in De Brakke Grond and at Artis Planetarium. Documentaries and projects will be presented in 20 theaters throughout Amsterdam.
The 35th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam takes place from 9 to 20 November.
Tickets available on the website: www.idfa.nl