Short & Youth Competitions, Signed, Best of Fests and Paradocs revealed

The IDFA Competition for Short Documentary showcases a mosaic of styles and themes, exploring everything a short documentary film can be. The selection presents films that use the form in imaginative and ambitious ways, by filmmakers at all stages of their careers.

Several films seek for echoes of the past in our current times, including The Iron by award-winning Vitaly Mansky, who returns to IDFA with a portrait of Europe in war time. In the melancholic The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, Theo Panagopoulos revisits archival footage of Palestine’s floral splendor from the 1930s, showing the complex relationship between the land and its inhabitants.

Other highlights include personal stories on grief, such as the mixed media exploration into losing someone close to you, Tough Love by Pat Heywood, and stop-motion animation Mama Micra by Rebecca Blöcher that examines how far people are willing to go to quench their thirst for personal freedom.

Curated by filmmaker Niki Padidar, the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary showcases a selection of films that distinctly challenge our understanding of youth documentary. The titles are presented for two distinct age groups: 9- to 12-year-olds, and 13-year-olds all the way to adulthood.

Moving beyond one-dimensional stereotypes, Tabarak Allah Abbas replaces people with cyborgs in her imaginative animation that tells the story of how her parents overcame fleeing Iraq, packed as a superhero adventure in My Homeland. In a break from traditional narrative arch, Camille Vigny’s Crushed parallels the story of a young girl’s love story turned violent with footage of car race crashes.

Read more about Niki Padidar's vision on shaking up youth programming in an interview here.

Signed showcases the latest cinematic adventures of some of the most original filmmakers of our time. The program celebrates those with a unique artistic signature, beyond the canon.

This edition’s selection is illustrious, bringing together the most well-known filmmakers and a younger generation of exceptional auteurs. Among them, award-winning filmmaker Radu Jude presents found-footage documentary Eight Postcards from Utopia, showing the commercials from Romania’s transition to a capitalist democracy, and impressionist desktop film Sleep #2, capturing live stream recordings of Andy Warhol’s grave. With a singular artistic approach, Mati Diop’s widely celebrated Dahomey critically examines questions of repatriation of African artefacts from Europe.

Several renowned directors push the boundaries of music film in this year's program. Andrei Ujică revisits 1965 in TWST / Things We Said Today, offering a poetic yet unembellished look at The Beatles as they captivate New York while the Watts riots erupt in Los Angeles. Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko creatively collages early ‘70s footage, exploring Lennon and Ono's idealistic vision for a better world.

The expansive Best of Fests section presents the year’s most eye-catching and celebrated films from various festivals from around the world. The selection uses vastly diverse styles and genres to take us to the world’s most burning topics.

The pressing urgency of conflict is ever-present in the selection. The outstanding film No Other Land by Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Balal, Rachel Szor, and Basel Adra documents ceaseless Israeli attacks on a network of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The film received IDFA Bertha Fund support in 2022. In Sudan, Remember Us, Hind Meddeb captures young activists in their struggle for a livable and democratic Sudan.

Other films traverse the world to depict heartfelt stories of resistance. After experiencing sexual assault, journalist Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries documents her search for justice in the face of a Japanese culture of silence. Following the discovery of unmarked graves near an indigenous reserve, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s Sugarcane reveals a long history of abuse and neglect of indigenous children in Canadian state-led boarding schools.

Paradocs showcases the year’s experimental documentary art. Several established names in the visual arts present their explorations into filmmaking.

Avant-garde legend John Smith reflects on his life and career by means of his nondescript name in Being John Smith. In Misty Man, Ansuya Blom alternates powerful scenes of a young man behind barbed wire with 8mm footage from the family archive and footage shot more recently in Suriname. Showcasing filmmakers experiment into form, highlights include the visceral and harrowing first-person documentation of the trenches in Ukraine in Real by filmmaker Oleh Sentsov.

With over 100 titles added to the selection, the film and new media program for IDFA 2024 is starting to take shape. Explore all the confirmed titles in our program below.