IDFA
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Jonathan Harris Peeks Inside the Lesbian Porn Industry in I Love Your Work
A three-time Webby Award winner and a 2009 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” who has exhibited at MoMA and built the world’s largest time capsule with Yahoo!, Jonathan Harris can now add the firestarters IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling – for his latest interactive project I Love Your Work – to his esteemed CV. In it Harris invites us on an online journey not to the Arctic Ocean with Alaskan Eskimos – as he did in his previous piece, The Whale Hunt – but into the lives of nine women residing in a much hotter climate, that of the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 23, 2014 -
Networking Can Kill You: Meeting a Murderer at IDFA
The end of the year is nigh. But in 2013 the film festival circuit will continue, contrary the Mayan calendar. So I’m glad I learned an important lesson from a cocktail party at IDFA. As we celebrate a wrap on 2012 and reflect on what we’ve achieved and learned over the course of the year, my mind flies back to one of the festival’s most memorable moments: I was sitting in IDFA’s official “writing room,” just a little stunned. Not just because I was in Amsterdam at the world’s largest documentary film festival, hearing the “Sinterklaas” Christmas parade outside and […]
by Wendy Dent on Dec 26, 2012 -
The Queen of A Doll’s House: Toneelgroep Amsterdam Stages Ibsen’s Nora
For the past few years I’ve been covering IDFA for Filmmaker, and whenever I’m in the city of canals I make sure to find time to catch the latest from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, which presents English sur-titled productions (often frustratingly projected too high above the action – please, directors, my neck!) on Thursday nights. Under the artistic leadership of internationally acclaimed Belgian director Ivo van Hove – known mostly to NYC audiences through his longtime relationship with New York Theatre Workshop – the Netherlands’ largest repertory company is shaking up the stage in ways I could only wish the Dutch filmmaking […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 17, 2012 -
Exploring Transmedia at the IDFA DocLab
It’s been more than a week since IDFA, but I can’t stop thinking about their DocLab program, a competition section showcasing “new and unexpected forms of digital documentary storytelling.” This program presents new non-fiction transmedia projects, each allowing the viewer to interact with the reality the filmmakers have documented and constructed. Most of the projects were presented in screenings or in talks at the excellent DocLab Interactive Documentary Conference. In addition, each was presented on their own computer monitors in the DocLab’s gallery space. What makes most of these mostly web-based projects different from a “normal” documentary is that the […]
by Rose Vincelli Gustine on Dec 7, 2012 -
Hearing Central Pitches at the IDFA Forum
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
by Rose Vincelli Gustine on Nov 22, 2012 -
CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? VIEWS FROM MARCH 2012’s THESSALONIKI DOC FEST
It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 18, 2012 -
Director Micha X. Peled on Bitter Seeds
Monsanto, the agriculture biotech company maligned in such docs as Food, Inc. and King Corn, found renewed opposition this month with the launch of an online petition gone viral called “Tell Obama to Cease FDA Ties to Monsanto.” The petition protests the president’s 2009 appointment of the company’s former VP, Michael Taylor, to the position of senior advisor to the FDA. That this years-late call to action has inspired more than 380,000 signatures attests to the toxicity of this particular marriage between government and a multinational corporation. If you’ll remember, Monsanto is the company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange, both of […]
by Daniel James Scott on Feb 9, 2012 -
FAVORITE FILM FESTIVAL EVENT 2011: MEET THE MAKERS WITH STEVE JAMES
One of the best things about the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, which took place November 16th–27th, is how community-inclusive the fest is, with most activities, from interactive exhibitions to informal master classes, open to the public free of charge. (Indeed, it’s possible to get your cinephile fix on a daily basis without ever buying a movie ticket.) And one of this year’s truly informative events was a Meet the Makers discussion at the Escape Club on Rembrandtplein hosted by Canadian documentarian Peter Wintonick. IDFA guest Steve James, who was honored with a retrospective, was there that Saturday morning to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 6, 2012 -
PAIRING FILMS AT IDFA 2011
The Jack the Ripper weather that blanketed part of the 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam this year seemed poetically apropos. Rushing from P&I screenings, to public showings, to private viewing booths I often felt like I was lost in a heavy fog of docs. In addition I took great advantage of the many behind-the-scenes and inside-scoop events — most free to the public — that gives this biggest doc fest in Europe its accessible community vibe. I watched a Talk Show with tabloid-deep Nick Broomfield discussing his Sarah Palin: You Betcha! over a live Internet feed. I attended in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Dec 5, 2011 -
Director Bram Van Paesschen on Empire of Dust
The vast wilderness of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a world away from the urban centers of China. Yet it is there that greater numbers of Chinese engineers are doing business. In the documentary Empire of Dust, featured in the “Panorama” section of this year’s International Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), director Bram Van Paesschen explores the fraught relationship between the Congolese and the Chinese, as shown through their efforts to build a road between two major cities in the DRC. In 2007, China and Congo signed a massive resources-for-infrastructure deal with projected revenues of $40-$120 billion. China endeavors […]
by Daniel James Scott on Dec 4, 2011
