The International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam has published the main competition lineups for its 39th edition, which runs Nov. 12 to 22 in Amsterdam. The full official selection counts 253 titles from 80 countries, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The festival opens Nov. 12 with the world premiere of White Tiger Column, a documentary by Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi and Bryan Dickie that follows recruits through 45 days of training with Myanmar's resistance movement. IDFA describes the film as a striking example of documentary cinema and a moving portrait of a courageous generation.
What is in the IDFA 2026 International Competition?
The International Competition assembles 13 works that, in the words of festival organizers, invite curiosity and critical reflection on the world today. Ten of the 13 are world premieres. The program spans Salomé Jashi's An Incomplete Day in the History of Georgia 10.06.93, Khadim Dai's Hazara Town, Carol Nguyen's Still Night, Burning House and Elwira Niewiera's Women and War.
Documentary here functions as a distributed verification layer: handheld records from Myanmar, Georgia, Iran and Brazil, cross-referencing official narratives against lived data. Louis Hothothot's The Year of the Ghost, a Netherlands/China production, and Michaël Andrianaly's Mangabangabaka extend that pattern into family memory and postcolonial archive.
Envision Competition: form as protocol
The Envision Competition screens 13 films in which, as IDFA states, form drives the narrative. Three titles carry the word memory in their name: Memories by Anna Falguères, Memories of Lightning by Riccardo Giacconi and Rivers of Memory by Shishir Jha. Memory is storage, and storage is politics; the section treats recollection as an editable dataset, reframed through distinct visual systems.
The lineup also includes Yuula Benivolski's The Black Box Is Orange, Lina Gorbaneva's My Own Personal Gulag, Lei Lei's Vertigo Garden and Stéphanie Roland's Drop! Cover! Hold On!.
Luminous and Frontlight: premieres and first features
The premieres-only Luminous section presents 21 features and shorts, with 19 world or international premieres and nine debut features. Hussein Al-asadi's She Was Not Alone, supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund, follows Zaira, an elderly woman living in the threatened marshlands of southern Iraq. Raluca Lupaşcu's A Modern Roma Fairytale tracks Nicoleta, 10, granddaughter of a Roma king, as she watches patriarchal tradition pre-write her future.
Frontlight, the second premieres-only strand, runs 16 films, among them Afsaneh Salari's Tehran, Under the Skin, an examination of Iran's cosmetic surgery culture, and Deborah Riley Draper's Romare Bearden: A Life in Collage.
Gibney, Fielder and Serra join the program
Alongside the competitions, IDFA added high-profile titles to other sections: Alex Gibney's Musk, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything, and Albert Serra's Sixteen Moments of My Life. The festival also runs a parallel infrastructure for production itself. Deadline reports that IDFA Forum 2026, the festival's co-production and co-financing market, selected 47 projects from nearly 900 submissions across pitches, roundtables, rough cuts and the DocLab Forum for new media. Business Doc Europe notes the Forum's 34th edition runs Nov. 15 to 18 with a revised presentation structure.
For a festival ecosystem that treats film as an accountability mechanism, the numbers are the signal: 253 titles, 80 countries, one opening film shot inside a jungle training camp. The selection runs Nov. 12 to 22 across Amsterdam venues.
FAQ
When does IDFA 2026 take place?
The 39th edition runs Nov. 12 to 22, 2026, in Amsterdam, opening with the world premiere of White Tiger Column.
How many films are in the IDFA 2026 selection?
The official selection includes 253 titles from 80 countries, with 13 films each in the International Competition and the Envision Competition.
What films were added beyond the competitions?
Alex Gibney's Musk, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything, and Albert Serra's Sixteen Moments of My Life join other festival sections.