'The Missing Picture' screens February 20 as part of IDA's The Art of Documentary screening series.
Docs about War
Oleksiy Radynski is one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary Ukrainian cinema. Since his early shorts, Radynski has worked in observational documentary and archival footage. In films like his feature-length debut Infinity According to Florian (2022), he explores culture, historical memory, and community, particularly within Kyiv’s urban landscapes. The full-scale invasion shifted Radynski’s focus more decisively towards found footage, as he became increasingly engaged in the recovery of previously forgotten Ukrainian cinema. Ahead of its world premiere, Documentary spoke with Radynski about Special Operation’s challenging production, the semiotics of surveillance cameras, and the depiction of imperialism through landscapes.
In Ukrainian, the film is called Myrni lyudy, which literally translates as Peaceful People. It is a clever, polysemic title that simultaneously addresses Ukrainian civilians embedded in their native wounded landscapes and Russian civilians calling their loved ones who are taking part in the invasion of Ukraine. Those people on the other end of the phone are fascinated by the soldiers’ detailed stories of war crimes and trophy theft and get very upset when their interlocutors become disillusioned with Russian propaganda. First screened at Berlinale, Intercepted has travelled to numerous festivals and political venues over the past year, including at IDFA in the Best of Fests section. Documentary spoke to Oksana Karpovych before the festival.
As a great-grandchild of Armenian genocide survivors uprooted from their indigenous lands, director Sareen Hairabedian carries a deeply personal
While the Venice film festival is widely treated as an awards platform for starry auteur-driven dramas, its little-known secret is a modest but strong nonfiction selection. Even without counting the Wang Bing film in competition, which screened too late for many critics (including this one) to cover, this year’s crop was remarkable for the breadth and variety of the nonfiction approaches.
Director Song Won-geun discusses historical documentary filmmaking and storytelling with specificity in relation to his film, “Panmunjom: The Front Lines of Ideology.” Song wanted to “explore Panmunjom as a truce site that hasn’t changed much for 70 years, without necessarily taking sides or seeing it through the lens of another powerful country.”
Had it not been for a spiraling rift that began with a pro-Palestinian protest on the opening night of last year’s IDFA, Armenian director Shoghakat
Mia Stewart’s upcoming 15-plus-years-in-the-making documentary, Searching for Onoda, deflates the heroic myth of Japanese holdout soldier Hiroo Onoda and tells the other side of the story. Both Arthur Harari’s 2021 Cannes-premiering narrative feature, 'Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle,' and Werner Herzog's debut 2022 novel, 'The Twilight World,' perpetuate the old myth.
We at IDA feel the full, devastating weight of the tragic death of Brent Renaud. On March 13, he was killed by Russian troops while making a
Syrian documentary filmmaker Feras Fayyad has been battling his whole professional life. First, he was battling to keep his family safe (he's still