IDFA 2024 to open with Danish-German-US documentary About a Hero

Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero will open the 37th edition of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The world’s largest cinematic gathering celebrating non-fiction, headed by Orwa Nyrabia since 2018, will host screenings of a total of 250 titles.

Developed through IDFA’s DocLab R&D Program, the opening film challenges Werner Herzog’s assertion that “a computer won’t be able to create a film as good as mine for at least another 4,500 years”, and for this purpose, Winiewicz trained an AI system on Herzog’s oeuvre and asked it to generate a screenplay. The provocative pic, a co-production between Tambo Film, Kaspar ApS, Pressman Films, Beofilm Pictures, Yo Productions, Cineteam, and Enigma with ARTE and DR on board, stars Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps.

This year’s international competition is made up of 13 titles – including an anonymous film – “drawing on and transcending deeply personal histories to reflect on our world today”. In this section, Anna Recalde Miranda’s Green is the New Red (De la guerre froide à la guerre verte) will celebrate its world premiere. The feature is a co-production between French outfits Lardux Films and Tell Me Films, Italy’s Mammut Film, Paraguay’s Picante, and Mario Adamson’s Stockholm-based firm Sysfos Film Production. In the film, the docmaker explores the violent legacy of anti-Communist repression in Latin America, tracing a direct line from the brutal tactics of Operation Condor in the 1970s to the modern persecution of indigenous people and land defenders. While today’s conflict centres on multinationals, especially in the soy industry, the methods remain strikingly similar, with economic interests protected by police and military force.

Miranda’s film examines the roots of this ongoing struggle, highlighting how landowners and corporations continue to criminalise or eliminate those fighting for land rights, leaving the continent still under the shadow of past violence.

In the Frontlight strand, Dennis Harvey’s short The Building and Burning of a Refugee Camp will have its European premiere. A Swedish-Irish co-production led by MDEMC Production, Harvey’s doc was shot in Dublin, where a group of asylum seekers set up a protest camp on Sandwith Street after the Irish government denied accommodation to 1,400 applicants. In particular, we zoom in on Sami, Hasiballah, and Simon, who give us a glimpse of their makeshift village, where they eat, paint banners, and plant flowers. However, their peaceful protest is disrupted by anti-immigration activist Philip Dwyer, who calls for their removal via social media. As tensions rise and progressive activists come to their aid, violent confrontations escalate, captured through phone footage, until the situation ultimately erupts.

Next, the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary will host the world premiere of Julia Dahr's short With Grace (29 min), produced by Norway's Differ Media, and the Dutch premiere of Anna-Maija Heinonen and Krista Moisio’s documentary Hard to Break (81 min), produced by Finland’s Polygraf.

Hard to Break follows Atte and Jonsu, two Finnish teenagers with a complicated relationship status, and promises to be “a moving portrait of two young people who, despite problems with addiction, violence, and loneliness, discover they have powerful reserves of resilience and determination”.

Moreover, the Retrospective dedicated to Belgian helmer and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez will feature the screening of US-Danish co-production Shadow World, courtesy of Louverture Films, Dillywood Inc., Final Cut for Real, and Cassette for Timescapes. The 2016 doc is a shocking analysis of the international arms trade, which shapes government policy, breeds corruption, undermines Western democracies, and causes widespread human suffering.

Finally, the Signed and Best of Fests strands will offer some of the latest non-fiction hits produced in the Nordic countries or with Nordic involvement, which were premiered at major fests such as Locarno, CPH:DOX, Berlin, Karlovy Vary, and Venice. Among these we have Nordic productions supported by Nordisk Film & TV Fond: Virpi Suutari’s Once Upon a Time in a Forest (Havumetsän lapset, Finland) and Max Kestner’s Life and Other Problems (Denmark/UK/Sweden).

Others are:

• Ben Rivers’ Bogancloch (UK/Germany/Iceland)
• Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir’s The Brink of Dreams (Egypt/France/Denmark/Qatar/Saudi Arabia)
• Nishtha Jain’s Farming the Revolution (India/France/Norway)
• Bår Tyrmi’s Lie to Me (Norway)
• Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land (Norway/Palestine)
• Inadelso Cossa’s The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder (Mozambique/France/Germany/Portugal/Netherlands/Norway)
• Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth (Ukraine/Denmark/Sweden/France)
• Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside (Nahnou Fil Dakhil) (Lebanon/Qatar/Denmark)
• Victoria Verseau’s Trans Memoria (Sweden/France)
• Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet’s Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other (UK/US/Denmark)