The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) returns to the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the world’s largest documentary film festival, taking place November 14 to 25, with a stellar selection of documentary films, including three premieres, as well as a unique film and performance event featuring three NFB interactive web documentaries.
Directed by Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight), The Fruit Hunters (EyeSteelFilm/NFB) follows devoted fruit fanatics who’ve dedicated themselves to searching for and saving rare and exotic fruit.
Daniel Leger’s Inseparable introduces audiences to Jean-Paul and Anne, who suffer from physical and intellectual impairments respectively, and share an unwavering love for each other.
For over 100 years, Aboriginal children in Canada were legally required to attend church-run boarding schools, an assimilationist practice now regarded as a national and cultural tragedy. Directed by Tim Wolochatiuk and written by Jason Sherman, We Were Children tells the heartbreaking true story of Lyna Hart and Glen Anaquod, removed from their homes at the ages of four and six and forced to adapt to a strange, threatening new world.
The End of Time is the final film in a trilogy of works by Peter Mettler that explores the limits of what can be expressed in cinema, following Picture of Light (1994) and Gambling, Gods & LSD (2002). In his latest work, Mettler takes on the elusive subject of time, again seeking to film the un-filmable on a journey that takes him to a particle accelerator in Switzerland and lava flows in Hawaii, disintegrating inner-city Detroit and a Hindu funeral rite near the place of Buddha’s enlightenment.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of DocLab, IDFA’s programme for showcasing new forms of digital storytelling that are expanding the documentary genre beyond linear filmmaking. On 16 November, the festival will pay tribute to the NFB’s leadership in interactive documentary with a unique evening of music and cinema at the De Brakke Grond Arts Centre. Three of the NFB’s finest interactive projects― the new release Here At Home; A Journal of Insomnia, part one now online; as well as the acclaimed webdoc Bear 71―will be combined in a 90-minute presentation.
