The 39th edition of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will open with White Tiger Column, a film set in one of the deadliest corners of the world.
The feature directed by Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi, and Bryan Dickie closely follows “a group of recruits through 45 days of training with Myanmar’s resistance movement,” according to a release. “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. A striking example of documentary cinema, the film offers a moving portrait of a courageous generation.”
IDFA, the largest documentary film festival in the world, runs from November 12-22 in the Dutch capital. The festival announced its competition lineups Tuesday, including White Tiger Column, which is slated to premiere in International Competition. That documentary is also nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature. Scroll for the complete lineup.
Thirteen films are screening in International Competition, a dozen of them world or international premieres. Those documentaries hail from around the world – Burkina Faso, Morocco, Senegal, Brazil, Ukraine and other European countries, Canada and more – but interestingly no films from the U.S. in that category.
“The International Competition brings together works that invite curiosity and critical reflection on our world today,” IDFA notes. “Across a wide range of subjects and filmmaking approaches, these films offer complex, layered perspectives on the present.”
The Envision Competition, meanwhile, offers “13 unparalleled films, each of them stylistically arresting, as visionary filmmakers forge new cinematic languages. The selection brings together titles in which form drives the narrative.” Envision titles include Bahía Honda, directed by Alejandro Alonso Estrella; Drop! Cover! Hold On!, directed by Stéphanie Roland; Shishir Jha’s Rivers of Memory, and My Own Personal Gulag, directed by Lina Gorbaneva. All of those films are world premieres.
IDFA announced it is adding two very high-profile documentaries to its lineup: You Can See Everything, the film directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that created a sensation when it premiered in Telluride, and Musk, Alex Gibney’s unflattering examination of world’s richest man Elon Musk. Newly added Sixteen Moments of My Life, directed by Albert Serra, spotlights Ingrid Caven singing live at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris.
The Special Screenings section brings an Eye Filmmuseum restoration of John Leerdam’s 30 mei, 1969 (gritu di un pueblo), revisiting “the historic uprising in Curaçao and the colonial inequalities and racial discrimination that fueled it.”
Luminous
The 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. 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, ten-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.
Frontlight
The 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. 15 of the selected titles are world or international premieres.
Several films offer immediate responses to critical current events, while others take time to reflect, examining the social realities and challenges shaping people’s lives. The Big Boom! by Gabriel Tejedor explores a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Kazanlak rife with contradictions and simmering tension, where the machine guns and rockets are destined for Ukraine while many of its employees are pro-Putin. 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.
Selected films: International Competition
• Bardi, dir. Tala Hadid (Morocco), 108’ – European Premiere
• Crack in the Head, Crack in the Sky, dir. Mehran Tamadon (France), 120’ – World Premiere
• Down the River, dir. Ruslan Fedotov (Germany), 79’ – World Premiere
• Hazara Town, dir. Khadim Dai (Belgium/Australia/Germany), 103’ – World Premiere
• Here Where the Fire Burns, dir. Juan Manuel Sepúlveda (Mexico), 97’ – World Premiere
• An Incomplete Day in the History of Georgia 10.06.93, dir. Salomé Jashi (Georgia), 100’ – World Premiere
• Lonan Tché, dir. Joël Richmond Mathieu Akafou (France/Italy/Ivory Coast/Senegal), 95’ – World Premiere
• Mangabangabaka, dir. Michaël Andrianaly (France/Madagascar/Burkina Faso), 92’ – World Premiere
• Morro Grande, dir. Isabel Joffily, Rita Toledo (Brazil/Netherlands), 88’ – World Premiere
• Still Night, Burning House, dir. Carol Nguyen (Canada), 76’ – International Premiere
• White Tiger Column, dir. Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi, Bryan Dickie (Canada), 95’ – World Premiere
• Women and War, dir. Elwira Niewiera (Germany/Poland/Ukraine), 103’ – World Premiere
• The Year of the Ghost, dir. Louis Hothothot (Netherlands/China), 95’ – World Premiere
Selected films: Envision Competition
• Bahía Honda, dir. Alejandro Alonso Estrella (Cuba/France/Norway), 85’ – World Premiere
• Between Revolutions, dir. Ruben Desiere (Belgium/Netherlands), 78’ – World Premiere
• The Black Box Is Orange, dir. Yuula Benivolski (Canada), 89’ – International Premiere
• Drop! Cover! Hold On!, dir. Stéphanie Roland (Belgium/France), 77’ – World Premiere
• Lyrical Vengeance, dir. wendelien van oldenborgh (Netherlands), 111’ – World Premiere
• Memories, dir. Anna Falguères (Belgium/France), 78’ – World Premiere
• Memories of Lightning, dir. Riccardo Giacconi (France/Italy), 73’ – International Premiere
• My Own Personal Gulag, dir. Lina Gorbaneva (Spain), 84’ – World Premiere
• Radiant Mountain, dir. Miguel Moraes Cabral (Belgium/Portugal/France), 75’ – World Premiere
• Ragazzi al fiume, dir. Pablo Briones (Switzerland), 75’ – World Premiere
• Rivers of Memory, dir. Shishir Jha (India), 72’ – World Premiere
• Vertigo Garden, dir. Lei Lei (Hong Kong / SAR /China), 73’ – World Premiere
• You Don’t Die Two Times, dir. Ager Oueslati (Algeria/Germany/Netherlands), 90’ – World Premiere
IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction
With ten titles, the IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction boldly expands the horizons of the documentary genre, pushing immersive media beyond conventional boundaries. Across VR, live theater performances, fulldome experiences, and multisensory works, the selection explores how immersive art can alter the way we encounter reality—offering unexpected perspectives and opening up new possibilities for agency and resistance.
Several artists use immersive experiences to bring audiences into close, embodied encounters with realities that may otherwise feel distant. Other works deal with the corporeal and the body, from digitally altering our perception of ourselves and inviting our microbiomes to a feast, to examining grief through magnifying the decomposition of a loved one’s body—turning grief and death into a profound reflection on how humans are but a part of a larger ecosystem.
IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling
The nine-title IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling expands the possibilities of documentary through digital art, games, interactive installations, and live performance. With artists from across disciplines bringing traditional forms into dialogue with new media, the selection showcases a new wave of cross-disciplinary experimentation.
Several works confront the digital systems shaping contemporary life, subverting algorithms and finding room for human error and agency. Other works invite audiences into interactive open worlds, adapting game and world-building technologies to create participatory experiences that radically depart from everyday reality. Elsewhere, artists explore the ever-evolving relationship between the physical and digital, investigating how technology fundamentally shapes our experience of intimacy, desire, and connection.
Cross-section awards
IDFA has also announced the nominations for the cross-section awards—distinct awards that transcend the program sections to recognize outstanding artistic achievement across the festival program.
The IDFA Award for Best First Feature celebrates the most remarkable debut feature-length films, recognizing works that reveal a distinctive creative voice and the promise of an evolving signature. Drawn from the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous, and Frontlight, the award is accompanied by a €5,000 prize, awarded by an international jury.
The films nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature are also eligible for the FIPRESCI Award, chosen by an international jury of film critics.
The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film highlights exceptional Dutch filmmaking talent across the International Competition, Envision Competition, Luminous, and Frontlight selections. The winning filmmaker with receive €5,000, awarded by an international jury.
The Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award for Best Creative Use of Archive honors outstanding archival film, selected from across the film program. The winning film will receive a €5,000 prize, awarded by an international jury.
The winners will be announced during the IDFA 2026 Awards Ceremony on Thursday, November 19.