IDFA 2024: what we watched, what we acquired, what got away
Four of us went to IDFA this year: Maarten, Dagmara, Kristoffer, and me. We were in Amsterdam from November 13–17, which is the middle of the festival and, in our experience, the best time — the buzz around the opening films has settled, the sales agents are less distracted, and you can still get into most screenings without the frantic scrambling of the final weekend.
We watched 31 films across the four days. Six will come to PölderPlay; two that we wanted are gone. Here's the full account.
The ones we're acquiring
Maasvlakte (Christoph Bauer, NL, 2021) — We've had a complicated relationship with Bauer's work. We tried to license his 2018 short Binnenhaven and lost it to a rights dispute between the director and his producer. Maasvlakte, his feature-length documentary about the Port of Rotterdam, has been a gap in our library that's embarrassed us: we're a Dutch streaming service and we didn't have the most significant Dutch industrial documentary of the decade. The rights situation was finally untangled this year. It will be in the library in December.
Skogens Röst (Erik Lundqvist, SE/FI, 2022) — A rewilding documentary set in Lapland, shot over three winters. Kristoffer had been tracking this since it premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023. We offered on the spot after the screening. Lundqvist was surprised; he'd expected to spend months in rights conversations. We try to move quickly on things we're certain about.
Vloed (Amara Osei, NL, 2024, 14 min) — A short, and the film that stopped us in our tracks on the first day. Fourteen minutes about flood memory and coastal infrastructure. Shot entirely on the Zeeland coast in January. Osei is 26. We asked to meet her for coffee the following morning and had heads of terms agreed before we left the festival. She cried, which made Dagmara cry, which is not something I will let Dagmara forget.
Echoes of Antwerp (Laurent Devos, BE, 2021) — A Belgian documentary about the Antwerp diamond trade and its Hasidic community, structured around a single extended family over fifteen years. We'd seen it at a Belgian film week in 2022 and missed the rights window. Back on the market because the original distribution deal expired. We took it immediately.
De Stille Wereld (Joost Verhoeven, NL, 2022) — A fiction feature in competition. Not our usual IDFA acquisition — we typically use the festival for documentaries — but Verhoeven's film was impossible to ignore. A slow, formally demanding drama about a deaf farmer in Zeeland. Three of us saw it in different screenings and all came away unable to stop thinking about the sound design.
Halvljus (Anna Stenmark, SE, 2022) — A documentary about long-term unemployment in northern Sweden, following three women over two years. Straightforward premise, extraordinary execution. Kristoffer's strongest recommendation of the festival.
The two that got away
This is the harder part to write.
There was a Finnish documentary — I'm not going to name it because it's still in active rights discussions and I don't want to complicate anyone's negotiations — that was the best documentary we saw at the festival. We were not the only ones who thought so. By the time we got to the sales table on the third day, three other platforms had already made offers. We were outbid by a margin that I found genuinely surprising for a Finnish documentary. It will go to a platform that can reach larger audiences than we can. I think it deserved a smaller, more attentive audience, but I understand why its producers made the decision they made.
The second one is more frustrating. A Polish short — 22 minutes, competition section, won the jury prize — where we couldn't agree on terms with the director's representative. The issue was an exclusivity clause: she wanted non-exclusive streaming rights so the film could also appear on the Polish public broadcaster's platform, and our standard agreement requires 12-month exclusivity. We offered to shorten the exclusivity window to six months. She needed three. We couldn't get our rights committee to approve a three-month exclusivity window in time, and she had another offer. We've updated our standard agreement to allow three-month exclusivity windows for short films under certain conditions. Lessons learned the hard way.
The festival itself
IDFA was, as always, the best-programmed documentary festival in the world and one of the more stressful professional experiences available. The screenings start at 9am and end after midnight. The sales meetings are scheduled in between and around and sometimes during. By day three you're making decisions about six-figure acquisitions on four hours of sleep and your third cup of coffee from the Pathé lobby.
The programming quality this year was noticeably higher than 2023, which had felt like an off-year. The competition section had at least five films that would have been standouts in any previous edition. Whether this reflects an actual improvement in the field or just a correction from a difficult year, I can't say.
We'll be back next year. We always are.