Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo will be the guest of honor at documentary film festival IDFA, which takes place from Nov. 12 to 22. The program of the section titled Dead Angle: Common Ground has also been announced, alongside a spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker William Greaves, and the lineup for the 20th anniversary of IDFA DocLab, which is themed “Shared Realities.” IDFA will present a retrospective of Huezo’s work, alongside a personal Top 10 film selection. An extended conversation with Huezo will be the centerpiece talk of this edition.
Huezo has “developed a distinctive body of work that moves between documentary and fiction, exploring how the violent consequences of organized crime and political turmoil shape the intimate lives of local families and communities,” the festival said. The film offers a portrait of a remote Salvadoran village whose inhabitants carry the memory of a massacre during the country’s civil war. Her fiction debut “Prayers for the Stolen” (2021) is a coming-of-age story about girls growing up in the mountains of Mexico, under the threat of human trafficking by local drug cartels.
The IDFA Bertha Fund-supported film “The Echo” (2023) offers a quiet portrait of life and childhood in a rural village, with daily delights contrasted with echoes of hardship—the title was pitched at IDFA Forum in 2021 and won the best documentary award at Berlinale in 2023. Dead Angle: Common GroundDead Angle is IDFA’s multi-year focus program that “uses documentary cinema to reveal what remains outside our direct field of vision.” Following “Borders” in 2024 and “Institutions” in 2025, the program closes with the theme “Common Ground,” exploring the “many ways people come together—from extraordinary acts of solidarity and collective resistance to the everyday life of communities and quintessential function of public space.” Several titles explore “solidarity in times of crisis.” Shinsuke Ogawa’s landmark film “The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka” (1968) documents farmers and student protestors banding together to resist the expansion of Tokyo’s Narita Airport. Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning “American Dream” (1990) portrays the unequal struggle between labor and capital in a prolonged strike in a meat packing plant in Minnesota.
Elsewhere, the program highlights “everyday forms of connection.” The Warsaw sidewalk becomes the stage in Paweł Łoziński’s “The Balcony Movie,” where his filming of casual encounters with passersby from his balcony becomes a portrait of neighborhood and community. José Luis Guerín’s “Work in Progress” (2001) shows how gentrification not only reshapes a bustling Barcelona neighborhood, but fractures the histories and relationships embedded in them. Together, the program invites audiences to reflect on the act of finding common ground—a gesture of humanity and hope in dark times.
The full selection will be revealed on Oct. 13. IDFA DocLab: Shared RealitiesCelebrating its 20th edition, IDFA DocLab looks back on two decades of pioneering interactive and immersive documentary art, while also turning toward the next 20 years. What began as an experiment in 2007, has grown into a “leading platform for the exploration of where digital art and critical reflection on technology meet.” Presented under the theme “Shared Realities,” the anniversary program reflects on DocLab’s history and traces plans to resurface formative archival works, while venturing forward to ask: which realities do we want to experience together in the future?
The theme echoes this year’s launch of a new, eponymous international consortium, Shared Realities, that brings together artists, researchers, academic partners, venues and cultural organizations to investigate new ways of creating, presenting and sustaining immersive art. IDFA DocLab returns with an exhibition in de Brakke Grond, ARTIS-Planetarium, Droog and Tobacco Theatre, with a diverse lineup of interdisciplinary immersive art and anniversary highlights to be revealed in the coming weeks. The full IDFA DocLab selection will be announced in October.
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