Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras will be guest of honor at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 9 to 20.
Poitras is currently on a packed festival tour with The Beauty And The Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion in Venice and is now an awards season contender. After Venice, the title screened in Toronto and has dates set for New York and the BFI London Film Festival.
As guest of honor at IDFA, Poitras will be feted with a retrospective and has also been given carte blanche to curate 10 films that have influenced her work and shaped her view of the world.
Her Top 10 selections include Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This is Not A Film, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.
As part of the sidebar, Poitras will also conduct on-stage conversations with a number of the selected filmmakers.
The retrospective section will present all seven feature films directed by Poitras from 2003 onwards, including The Beauty And The Bloodshed; her 2016 portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Risk; Oscar-winning work CitizenFour, and her first feature Flag Wars, a cinéma vérité film on the gentrification of a working-class African American neighbourhood.
The festival will also hold a public master talk with Poitras and IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia.
In other festival news, IDFA also unveiled a sidebar entitled “Around Masculinity” interrogating masculinity from a variety of perspectives.
Titles in the line-up will include docs such as Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, the Maysles Brothers’ Meet Marlon Brando, Heddy Honigmann’s Crazy, Pirjo Honkasalo’s The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, Anand Patwardhan’s Father, Son And Holy War and Alina Rudnitskaya’s Bitch Academy.
IDFA also announced the “Playing Reality” sidebar exploring documentary works employing drama techniques such as Clio Bernard’s The Arbor, Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Lola Arias’ Theatre of War and Eduardo Coutinho’s Moscow.
The festival also revealed its new media DocLab strand will unfold this year under the theme of “Nervous Systems” and explore what it means to be alive in these changing times through digital art installations, multisensory experiences, live events, motion capture performances, and the metaverse.
