The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam — IDFA — runs every November in the city, filling the Tuschinski, the Eye, the Melkweg, and a dozen smaller venues with documentary work from around the world. It is, by attendance and by ambition, the largest documentary film festival in the world, and its programming has long been more adventurous than its size might suggest: the competition sections actively seek out work that challenges what documentary is supposed to do.
The 37th edition, held from 20 November to 1 December 2024, continued this tradition. The competition was notably strong in work from the Middle East and Central Asia — not surprising given current events, but the quality of the films went beyond urgent subject matter into genuine formal invention.
The IDFA Award: No Other Land
No Other Land, the Palestinian-Israeli co-production documenting the destruction of the Masafer Yatta village, had already won the Documentary prize at the Berlinale earlier in 2024 and arrived at IDFA with substantial critical momentum. Its IDFA award was expected; the conversation around its distribution difficulties — no major distributor had picked it up for US release at the time of the festival — was the more important story. The film eventually found distribution, but the delays raised questions about what the documentary ecosystem is actually able to do with politically inconvenient work.
The Luminous Exception: Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
The film that generated the most sustained critical excitement was Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État — a three-hour essay film about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, told through jazz and Cold War archival footage. It is the kind of film IDFA was built for: formally ambitious, politically serious, intellectually demanding, and genuinely entertaining in a way that dismisses any suggestion that these qualities are incompatible.
“Grimonprez uses the structure of a jazz record — themes, variations, solos, returns — to organise archival footage, testimony, and analysis across three hours without once losing the thread or the rhythm. It is the best essay film in years.”
The State of Documentary
IDFA 2024 was particularly strong in films that refused the conventional documentary grammar — the talking-head structure, the narrator-as-guide, the emotional crescendo timed to the third act. The most interesting work in competition used archive, found footage, re-enactment, and essay form in combinations that felt genuinely new. This is partly a generational shift — filmmakers who grew up with essay films as a recognised form are now making them without defensiveness — and partly a response to the specific demands of subjects that resist conventional treatment.
The festival runs alongside the IDFA Forum, the documentary co-production market, which gives it a practical dimension absent from most festivals. Films that win at IDFA tend to move into distribution; the festival functions as a quality signal that travels. This year’s winners should be widely available by mid-2025.