Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of Citizenfour, whose latest doc, The Beauty and the Bloodshed, won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, will be this year’s guest of honor at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
IDFA will host a retrospective of Poitras’ work, screening all 7 documentaries she has directed, from her 2003 feature debut Flag Wars, a cinéma vérité film on the gentrification of a working-class
African American neighborhood at the hands of wealthy gay men, to The Beauty and the Bloodshed, which follows the career of photographer and artist Nan Goldin and her campaign to hold Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family responsible for the opioid addiction crisis. Poitras is perhaps best known for her portraits of Edward Snowden (the Oscar-winning Citizenfour) and Julian Assange (2016’s Risk).
Poitras will also curate a top 10 program of films that have shaped her work and view of the world, a selection that includes such features as Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) and This is Not a Film
by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, and ground-breaking documentaries including Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985).
IDFA will hold a public master talk with Poitras and IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia in
Amsterdam’s historic Pathé Tuschinski cinema.
On Tuesday, IFDA also unveiled two of its curated focus programs for 2022: Around
Masculinity, which aims to reassess depictions of the alpha male and toxic masculinity through a re-examination of documentary classics including Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982) about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the Maysles Brothers’ Meet Marlon Brand (1966); and Playing Reality, which will look at performance and re-enactment in documentaries with screenings of such films as Clio Bernard’s The Arbor (2010) on renowned playwright Andrea Dunbar, and Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997).
The 35th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam runs November 9-20.
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