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Now in its seventh year at the beachy southern edge of Queens, the Rockaway Film Festival has revealed its 2024 lineup, which IndieWire shares exclusively. The festival runs August 17-25, 2024 and features outdoor screenings and conversations at the Rff’s regular yearlong venue, the Arverne Cinema.

This year’s highlights include Jamil McGinnis and Pat Heywood’s looping, multi-screen installation “Waking Up (For the First Time),” a tribute to experimental animator Faith Hubley, with live music performances and DJ sets featuring members of indie bands Animal Collective and Mgmt.

Special events include bio-art and stop-motion animated workshops, children’s cinema, the U.S. premiere of “The Future Perfect” director Nele Wohlatz’s comedy of misunderstandings “Sleep with Your Eyes Open,” the New York premiere of Juan Palacios and Sofie Husum Johannesen’s “As the Tide Comes In,” plus the world premieres of Corey Hughes’ “Your Final Meditation” and Sam Fleischner’s “Jetty.

Feature film projects from Godland filmmaker Hlynur Palmason and Small Body director Laura Samani are among 31 titles that have received a combined €8.8m in the latest session of Council of Europe co-production fund Eurimages.

Iceland’s Palmason received €500,000 for On Land And Sea. Produced by France’s Maneki Films, Denmark’s Snowglobe and Iceland’s Still Vivid, it will shoot this autumn. Set at the turn of the 19th century, the film will follow a family which transforms its house into a raft and goes looking for a new place to live.

Scroll down for the full list or projects...

Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel (VdR) has revealed the line-up for its 55th edition (April 12-21) which opens with the IDFA- and Göteborg selection As The Tide Comes In by Juan Palacios (and co-directed by Sofie Husum Johannesen).

The full selection includes 128 films, 88 of which are world premieres.

Among the 14 world premieres in international competition is Apple Cider Vinegar from Belgium’s Sofie Benoot whose 2020 documentary Victoria won the Caligari award at Berlinale Forum. Her latest feature is part nature documentary, part philosophical tale beginning with the journey of a kidney stone.

Other world premieres include Swiss titles The...

Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled the program for its 55th edition, which includes 10 first films out of 15 in the main international competition, cementing its reputation as a springboard for emerging talent.

The official selection includes 165 films from 50 countries and no fewer than 88 world premieres, making VdR the place to be in April on the international non-fiction film calendar.

Key figures from the world of cinema will be attending including outgoing Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian in the main competition jury, Argentine director and screenwriter Martín Rejtman with his latest film “Riders” in the Burning Lights section, and celebrated French author Christine Angot with her debut film “Une Famille,” which premiered in Berlin.

This year’s opening film is Juan Palacios and Sofie Johannesen’s “As the Tide Comes In,” which has been touring the festival circuit since opening at IDFA. Guests of honor include acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke,...

France-based sales agency Lightdox has acquired the international rights to feature documentary “As the Tide Comes In” by Basque director Juan Palacios, co-directed with Sofie Husum Johannesen, ahead of its Nordic premiere at the 47th edition of Göteborg Film Festival. The film is competing for the Dragon Award as part of the Nordic Documentary Competition.

“As the Tide Comes In” had its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November, where it was part of the International Competition. (Read Variety‘s interview with Palacios here).

The film also screens as part of the Cph:dox program Dox:danmark, and will launch the program with a special preview on Feb. 21 at Grand Teatret in Copenhagen and in nine other municipalities. On Feb. 22, the film will officially premiere in movie theaters in Denmark.

“As the Tide Comes In” is a portrait of the microcosm of life on the island of Mandø...

Festival selection includes Nikolaj Arcel’s ‘The Promised Land’ and Ernst De Geer’s ‘The Hypnosis’.

Goteborg Film Festival has selected almost 250 films for its 47th edition, including recent Nordic favourites The Promised Land starring Mads Mikkelsen and The Hypnosis by Ernst De Geer.

The festival, which runs from January 26 to February 4, has also programmed events including a talk between Ruben Ostlund and Cannes director Thierry Fremaux; and selected Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen to receive its Nordic Honorary Dragon award.

Scroll down for the list of festival titles

The 10 films competing in the Nordic Competition include Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land,...

The Göteborg Film Festival has unveiled the competition titles selected for its 47th edition, which runs from January 26 to February 4. (Scroll down for the full list).

Göteborg is split into four competition strands. The main strand is the Nordic Competition, which features nine films from the Nordic region. The competition’s winner takes home the Dragon Award and a Sek 400,000 cash prize. The rest of the festival comprises the Nordic Documentary Competition, the Ingmar Bergman Competition for first-time filmmakers, and the International Competition.

Among the Nordic highlights is Madame Luna, Swedish filmmaker Daniel Espinosa’s return to Nordic filmmaking following a series of Hollywood titles such as Morbius and Safe House. Inspired by real-life events, the film follows an Eritrean refugee who gets stuck in Libya and becomes a notorious human trafficker known as “Mama Luna” with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. When she is forced to flee to...

On his radio show A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor used to refer amusingly to “Norwegian Bachelor Farmers” who resided in his (make believe) hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Not only was the town fictional, so were those putative Norwegian yeomen. For a real-life, honest-to-goodness, authentic Scandinavian Bachelor Farmer, you can turn to the documentary As the Tide Comes In, which recently made its world premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (better known as IDFA). The film directed by Juan Palacios principally revolves around Gregers, the last farmer inhabiting remote Mandø, an island in Denmark’s Wadden Sea.

Mandø, measuring only 8-square kilometers, isn’t easy to access.

High tide covering the only road to get to Mandø Island, Denmark on July 30, 2021.

“It’s a place that is pretty much ruled by the tides,” Palacios explains. “In order to get to the island, you have to go through this...

IDFA – the largest documentary film festival in the world — has just wrapped its 36th edition, and it was a memorable one by every definition. Two hundred and fifty films screened in Amsterdam, representing work from across the globe –the Middle East to Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe.

In a special edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we report on the festival from Amsterdam, speaking on the ground with five notable filmmakers, including Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, who came to IDFA for the European premiere of his new Netflix documentary Stamped From the Beginning, an examination of how racist ideas have permeated American culture.

Sex researcher Shere Hite

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nicole Newnham tells us how European audiences reacted to her award-winning documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite, about the titular American sex researcher who became a sensation after the publication of her book The Hite Report in the 1970s,...

Due to world premiere in IDFA’s international competition program on Monday, the Danish doc “As the Tide Comes In” is a collaborative work between Basque-born director Juan Palacios, and the team behind the multi-awarded film “The Lost Leonardo”: Sofie Husum Johannesen, making her debut here as co-director, Andreas Dalsgaard, acting as executive producer and idea initiator, editor Nicolas Nørgaard Staffolani and producer Kasper Lykke Schultz.

With their shared anthropological perspective, the filmmaking team have captured the extraordinary life of the 27 residents of the tiny Danish Wadden Sea island of Mandø, which can only be reached at low tide. The islanders – including Gregers, the only farmer and youngest of all – are stoically fighting off severe weather conditions and the risk of flooding, like survivors of a doomed refuge, waiting for the inevitable catastrophe to happen. “It is a metaphor for where we are as human beings and the challenges...

Copenhagen-based Elk Film’s hunger for global reach with quality creative docs was fully-achieved with the art world mystery “The Lost Leonardo,” one of the most buzzed about documentaries of 2021, released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics.

Elk Film’s co-founders, director/producer Andreas Dalsgaard and editor Nicolás Nørgaard Staffolani (“Cold Case Hammarskjöld”) are on the verge of inking a deal for a fiction series take of “The Lost Leonardo” with Studiocanal, The Picture Company, Entertainment 360, together with Vestigo Films’ Christoph Jörg. At the same time, the partners are gearing up for the world premiere of “As the Tide Comes In” at IDFA in the International Competition section.

The Danish film is helmed by Basque-born Juan Palacios with co-director Sofie Husum Johannesen, a trained anthropologist like most of Elk’s creatives. The feature-length doc is a portrait of the Danish Wadden Sea island of Mandø and its 27 dwellers,...

This year’s edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) will open with the world premiere of “A Picture to Remember” by Olga Chernykh. The film, which received the support of the IDFA Bertha Fund in 2022, is a deeply personal account of the ongoing war in Ukraine and its violent history, seen through the prism of three generations of women.

The full program for the festival’s 36th edition was announced earlier today by IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, who stated the festival’s opening film is “both personal and political,” adding that “the director does not shy away from trying to build a cinematic world with fragile elements. The courage and originality of the film’s approach opens up to a much larger worldview.”

Before announcing this year’s full lineup, Nyrabia took a moment to acknowledge the current Israel-Hamas war: “To us, respecting the human...

Olga Chernykh’s A Picture To Remember explores the war in Ukraine through three generations.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam will open with the world premiere of Ukrainian filmmaker Olga Chernykh’s A Picture To Remember as the festival unveils the line-ups for the international and Envision competitions.

A Picture To Remember explores the war in Ukraine through three generations of women, including the director herself, and is a co-production between Ukraine, France and Germany. The film is screening in Envision and has received backing from the IDFA Bertha Support fund.

The international competition features 11 titles, seven of which are world premieres,...

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam revealed its opening night film and announced competition lineups in two main categories today, completing the program for the upcoming 36th edition of the world’s largest documentary festival.

At a press conference in Amsterdam, A Picture to Remember, directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Olga Chernykh, was announced as IDFA’s opening night film on November 8. The festival, which includes more than 250 films total, runs from Nov. 8-19.

“[A Picture to Remember] presents a deeply personal and essay-style account of the ongoing war in Ukraine and its violent history, seen through the prism of three generations of women: Chernykh herself, her mother, and her grandmother,” IDFA said in a release. “In a bid for connection and intimacy, the filmmaker uses old family films, recordings of conversations, and news reports to bridge the distance between her and her grandmother. The result is a kaleidoscopic and personal film that travels through time fluidly.

Director Juan Palacios’s documentary maps out the ancient plains of central Spain, tracing the line between the rural and the modern, the boundless and the individual

Juan Palacios’s enigmatic documentary portrait of an unnamed village nestled in the vast flat plains of central Spain extracts the otherworldly out of the everyday. In a land where livestock seem to outnumber people, time is felt not in the ticking of a clock but in wordless quotidian activities. The sounds of herded cattle, beans being threshed or wet clothes slapped on a washboard by a babbling brook become a highly sensorial symphony that accentuates the stillness and the melancholy of the landscape.

But as daily vignettes slowly unfold, technology subtly makes itself known. Roaming from one dusty field to another, two young girls are dismayed that no creature shows up on their Pokémon Go app. In another otherworldly moment, shots of...

Reflecting the big issues examined in this year’s film lineup, the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival’s (Cph:dox) industry section likewise grapples with such major topics as climate change, biodiversity and the tectonic shifts being felt far and wide in the global political and economic order.

The industry sidebar comprises the Forum financing and co-production event; the Conference series; the on-demand Market screening platform; the Lab talent development program; the Hub meeting and networking event; the educational Talents initiative; and the new Inter:Active Symposium, which focuses on new media.

Forum will present 35 selected co-production projects in various stages. While the projects can be in any stage of development, they have to officially launch at the Forum and not have participated in previous pitching events.

“In terms of the curation or how we select, the overall curation of the festival also counts for what we do in the industry department – it...

Line-up also includes the new project from two-time Oscar nominee Lucy Walker.

Danish documentary festival Cph:dox has revealed the 35 projects set to be presented at Cph:forum, its financing and co-production event that will take place online-only from April 26-30.

Scroll down for full list of titles

The selection includes new projects from two-time Oscar nominee Lucy Walker (Waste Land), Sundance winners Mads Brügger (Cold Case Hammarskjöld) and Eugene Jarecki (The House I Live In), Berlin Crystal Bear winner Geneviève Dulude-De Celle (A Colony) and Venice Horizons winner Lech Kowalski (East Of Paradise).

Further notable filmmakers include Radu Ciorniciuc, whose Acasa,...

‘+90dB’

A Basque rock band travels the globe playing to diehard fans from Japan, the U.S., Germany and France. Marina Lameiro’s second film, produced by Arena Comunicación and Txalap.art.

‘918 Nights’

Arantza Santesteban writes and directs her first feature documentary in which she explores the experience of being incarcerated for what seemed to be 918 nights. Txintxua Films and Hiruki Filmak currently produce.

‘Bromo: Agent Gernika’

Directed by Gerard Escuer the documentary follows the tumultuous life of José Laradogoitia a Basque double spy that worked against the Nazis during the World War Two. Produced by Area Audiovisual the documentary that plays with fictionalized scenes was selected in the Co production Forum of Documentaries Lau Haizetara on the 67th edition of San Sebastian. Is currently in preproduction.

‘Bye, Bye, Mr. Etxebeste’

Asier Altuna and Telmo Esnal’s follow-up to their 2005 social satire “Hello, Mr. Etxebeste,” the first Basque-language feature in years,...

A Moon For My Father, Dark Suns also among winners.

This year’s Cph:dox festival in Copenhagen has handed out its main prize, the Dox:Award, to John Skoog’s Ridge. The film is an artistic hybrid documentary portrait of the Swedish summer, featuring visual art, abstract fiction and documentary material from Skåne, the country’s southernmost county.

The jury, consisting of producer Katrin Pors, critic and curator Eric Hynes, filmmaker Soudade Kaadan, filmmaker Frederic Tcheng, and Berlinale Panorama programme director Paz Lazaro, also gave a special mention to Pia Hellenthal’s feminist doc Searching Eva about a young woman living in Berlin.