U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20.
Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.
In the Retrospective section, IDFA presents all seven films directed by Poitras from 2003 to today. Alongside her best-known titles, the program includes lesser-screened films such as “Risk,” the portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and her first feature, “Flag Wars,” a cinéma vérité film on the gentrification of a working-class African American neighborhood.
The festival will also hold a public master talk with Poitras and IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia in Amsterdam’s historic Pathé Tuschinski cinema.
IDFA also plans two Focus programs, which look at particular themes. The program titled Around Masculinity “interrogates the problematic social construct that is masculinity from a variety of perspectives.” The section includes Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,” the Maysles Brothers’ “Meet Marlon Brando,” Heddy Honigmann’s “Crazy” and Pirjo Honkasalo’s “The 3 Rooms of Melancholia.”
Another Focus program, titled Playing Reality, has films that “creatively reimagine the concept of theatricality.” These include Clio Bernard’s “The Arbor,” Werner Herzog’s “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” Lola Arias’ “Theatre of War” and Eduardo Coutinho’s “Moscow.”