Focus program on finding Common Ground

Dead Angle is IDFA's multi-year focus program that uses documentary cinema to reveal what remains outside our direct field of vision. Following Borders (2024) and Institutions (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 confirmed 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) poignantly portrays the unequal struggle between labor and capital in a prolonged strike in a meat packing plant in Minnesota. 

In turn, the films also reveal filmmaking itself as an act of solidarity: a commitment by filmmakers to stand alongside the people they document, bearing witness to acts of resistance and collective action. 

Elsewhere, the program highlights everyday forms of connection. The Warsaw sidewalk becomes the stage in Pawel Lozinski’s The Balcony Movie, where his filming of casual encounters with passersby from his balcony becomes an intimate portrait of neighbourhood and community. José Luis Guerín’s Work in Progress (2001) shows how gentrification not only reshapes a bustling Barcelona neighbourhood, but fractures the histories and relationships embedded in them. Everybody to Kenmure Street (2026) by Felipe Bustos Sierra captures a captivating account of collective resistance, when hundreds of Glasgow residents protested and prevented the deportation of two of their neighbours. 

Together, the program invites audiences to reflect on the act of finding common ground—a gesture of humanity and hope in dark times.