25/10/2018 - Kabul, City in the Wind is set to open Europe’s leading documentary festival, while 12 films will be vying for awards in the main Competition and 13 in First Appearance

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) announced the full programme of its 31st edition, set to run from 14-25 November, at a press conference at De Balie yesterday.

In the festival's flagship selection, the Competition for Feature-length Documentary, there are 12 titles by established filmmakers, among them Nikolaus Geyrhalter's The Border Fence [+see also:
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film profile] (Italy), Eszter Hajdú's Hungary 2018 [+see also:
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interview: Víctor Moreno
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film profile] (Netherlands/Suriname) and ‘Now something is slowly changing’ [+see also:
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The festival will officially open with Kabul, City in the Wind [+see also:
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Amini's film is also part of the prestigious IDFA Competition for First Appearance, described as "a strong selection of movies from emerging filmmakers who gave it their all for their debut film". The section contains 13 titles, including six European productions or co-productions: Emmanuelle Bonmariage's Manu [+see also:
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interview: Emmanuelle Bonmariage
film profile] (Belgium), Nicole Vögele's Closing Time [+see also:
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film profile] (Poland), Sebastiano d'Ayala Valva's Giacinto Scelsi. The First Motion of the Immovable [+see also:
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In the Serialized focus programme, IDFA will experiment with the format of documentary series within a festival setting, with a line-up of five series encompassing both web documentaries and linear documentaries, including The Village by Claire Simon. Click here for the full line-up. 

The festival has also announced 11 titles in the Competition for Dutch Documentary (click here), as well as three DocLab selections that investigate the ways in which the digital revolution is influencing reality and documentary artists in every possible discipline: Digital Storytelling, Immersive Non-Fiction and DocLab Spotlight.

For the second time, the Amsterdam Human Rights Award will be given to one of the ten documentaries screening across the various sections which bring the theme of human rights to life with great cinematic power. Click here for more details.

Finally, the list of juries can be found here.