Ver Cine Colombiano: Noticias | Proimágenes Colombia

IDFA is the largest documentary film festival in the world, held annually in Amsterdam, Netherlands, since 1988. Over twelve days, it screens more than 300 films, sells more than 250,000 tickets, and welcomes more than 3,000 guests. The festival strives to strengthen the international documentary climate by focusing more than ever on documentary film as an art form. This focus includes documentary films with an original visual language or structure, films that show lesser-known cultures or are filmed from a non-Western perspective, and interactive or immersive documentaries that innovate the field.

The festival believes in the power of documentary film as a high-quality, artistic form of information and reflection. It heightens films that help us understand the world and determine our place in it, making us think and build better societies with more democracy, openness, and humanity.
 
For the 2022 edition, two Colombian productions will participate in the Best of Fests section, which presents award-winning films, audience favorites, and outstanding titles from the international festival circuit. In Alis, a documentary directed by Clare Weiskopf and Nicolás Van Hemelryck, eight formerly homeless teenage girls give life to a fictitious classmate in a creative act. As reality stands out and fiction fades, the innocent game becomes a descent into hell where their glowing faces will guide us to the dark world they once inhabited. The film won the Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Generation14 Plus section at the Berlinale 2022, the Forum Award for Best Project at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam -IDFA-, the Young Jury Award at the Sheffield DocFest, and the Audience Award and the Student Jury Award of the Institute of Higher Latin American Studies at the Biarritz Amérique Latine Festival, among others.
 
In the same section is Theo Montoya's Anhell69. In this film, the director dives deep into a generation with no future, torn apart by drugs and suicide in a city defined by violence. All hope is gone, and getting high is all that remains. Montoya sees Medellín as a ghost town lost in the mountains, where you can't see the horizon and can never escape. Anhell69 received the Golden Dove in the International Competition of the 65th Leipzig International Documentary and Animation Film Festival -DOK Leipzig-; as well as a Special Jury Mention, the Mario Serandrei - Hotel Saturnia Award, and the Most Innovative Film Award granted by the Verona Film Club, during the 37th edition of the Venice International Critics' Week.
 
The Luminous section, which showcases premieres in a wide range of styles and formalist approaches —from observational to personal and experimental, vindicating the individual as a window to the universal— will include Amando a Martha by Daniela López (Colombia, Argentina). When Daniela, the documentary's director, was about to move in with her partner, she received a worrying letter from Martha, her grandmother. Martha noticed that Daniela's boyfriend was very dominant and verbally abusive. After living in psychological terror in a lousy marriage for 39 years, Martha wants a very different life for her granddaughter. It seems that the time has come to make the film Martha proposed to her many years ago about how her husband made her life a living hell. What at first appears to be Martha's life story soon expands into a complex family drama in which even the film project becomes controversial.

Finally, Ana Bravo Pérez's Los órganos internos de la madre tierra, a co-production between Colombia and the Netherlands —produced by Joram Kraaijeveld and Bravo Pérez for Urkunina Films— will premiere at the IDFA Documentary Short Film Competition. In this experimental work, the director traces the coal stench in the port of Amsterdam back to its source: an open wound in northern Colombia. The mine is located in the territory of the Wayúu and dramatically impacts the indigenous peoples.