Festival lineup includes 253 titles from 80 countries 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. 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 filmIDFA 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. International CompetitionThe 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 CompetitionThe Envision Competition offers “13 unparalleled films, each of them stylistically arresting, as visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages,” the festival said. 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.” LuminousThe 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. FrontlightThe 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.
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.
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