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Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo will be the guest of honor at documentary film festival IDFA, which takes place from Nov. 12 to 22.
The program of the section titled Dead Angle: Common Ground has also been
announced, alongside a spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker William Greaves, and the lineup for the 20th anniversary of IDFA DocLab, which is themed “Shared Realities.”
IDFA will present a retrospective of Huezo’s work, alongside a personal Top 10 film selection. An extended conversation with Huezo will be the centerpiece talk of this edition.
Huezo has “developed a distinctive body of work that moves between documentary and fiction, exploring how the violent consequences of organized crime and political turmoil shape the intimate lives of local families and communities,” the festival said. “Her cinema is rooted in close observation and shaped by a highly attentive visual and sonic language—allowing memories and experience to surface through atmosphere and deeply personal stories.”
Huezo first gained international recognition with her feature-length debut “The Tiniest Place” (2011), which screened at over 80 international festivals, taking home several awards, including best feature at Visions du Réel. The film offers a portrait of a remote Salvadoran village whose inhabitants carry the memory of a massacre during the country’s civil war.
Her fiction debut “Prayers for the Stolen” (2021) is a coming-of-age story about girls growing up in the mountains of Mexico, under the threat of human trafficking by local drug cartels.
The IDFA Bertha Fund-supported film “The Echo” (2023) offers a quiet portrait of life and childhood in a rural village, with daily delights contrasted with echoes of hardship—the title was pitched at IDFA Forum in 2021 and won the best documentary award at Berlinale in 2023.
Dead Angle: Common Ground
Dead Angle is IDFA’s multi-year focus program that “uses documentary cinema to reveal what remains outside our direct field of vision.”
Following “Borders” in 2024 and “Institutions” in 2025, the program closes with the theme “Common Ground,” exploring the “many ways people come together—from extraordinary acts of solidarity and collective resistance to the everyday life of communities and quintessential function of public space.”
Several titles explore “solidarity in times of crisis.” Shinsuke Ogawa’s landmark film “The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka” (1968) documents farmers and student protestors banding together to resist the expansion of Tokyo’s Narita Airport.
Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning “American Dream” (1990) portrays the unequal struggle between labor and capital in a prolonged strike in a meat packing plant in Minnesota.
Elsewhere, the program highlights “everyday forms of connection.” The Warsaw sidewalk becomes the stage in Paweł Łoziński’s “The Balcony Movie,” where his filming of casual encounters with passersby from his balcony becomes a portrait of neighborhood and community. José Luis Guerín’s “Work in Progress” (2001) shows how gentrification not only reshapes a bustling Barcelona neighborhood, but fractures the histories and relationships embedded in them. “Everybody to Kenmure Street” (2026) by Felipe Bustos Sierra captures an account of collective resistance, when hundreds of Glasgow residents protested and prevented the deportation of two of their neighbors.
Together, the program invites audiences to reflect on the act of finding common ground—a gesture of humanity and hope in dark times. The full selection will be revealed on Oct. 13.
IDFA DocLab: Shared Realities
Celebrating its 20th edition, IDFA DocLab looks back on two decades of pioneering interactive and immersive documentary art, while also turning toward the next 20 years. What began as an experiment in 2007, has grown into a “leading platform for the exploration of where digital art and critical reflection on technology meet.”
Presented under the theme “Shared Realities,” the anniversary program reflects on DocLab’s history and traces plans to resurface formative archival works, while venturing forward to ask: which realities do we want to experience together in the future?
The theme echoes this year’s launch of a new, eponymous international consortium, Shared Realities, that brings together artists, researchers, academic partners, venues and cultural organizations to investigate new ways of creating, presenting and sustaining immersive art.
IDFA DocLab returns with an exhibition in de Brakke Grond, ARTIS-Planetarium, Droog and Tobacco Theatre, with a diverse lineup of interdisciplinary immersive art and anniversary highlights to be revealed in the coming weeks. The full IDFA DocLab selection will be announced in October.
Spotlight on William Greaves
IDFA presents a spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker, producer, editor and actor William Greaves (1926–2014), “bringing a rediscovered voice in cinema back into view.”
“Across a formally inventive filmography shaped by sharp observation of social and political life, Greaves explored Black history and culture, collective action and the tensions that emerge when people come together,” the festival said.
The spotlight includes the newly completed “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (2026), a cinéma vérité film shot on 16mm, capturing a 1972 reunion of key Harlem Renaissance figures in Duke Ellington’s apartment, completed posthumously by Greaves’ son and granddaughter David and Liani Greaves. Cult classic “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (1971) turns a fiction shoot in Central Park into a self-reflexive study of a film crew in revolt, while “The Fight [The William Greaves Director’s Cut]” (1973) captures the charged atmosphere surrounding the Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali championship bout.
