The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam announced the competition lineups for its 39th edition on Tuesday, and the full official selection now counts 253 titles from 80 countries, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The festival runs Nov. 12-22 in Amsterdam.
Headlining the additions is Musk, the Alex Gibney documentary about Elon Musk, alongside Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything and Albert Serra's Sixteen Moments of My Life. Gibney taking on Musk is the kind of matchup that gets attention on both sides of the Atlantic. Musk has spent the last year remaking federal agencies through the Department of Government Efficiency, and Hollywood's most prolific documentarian now has a film about him screening at the world's largest documentary festival.
Opening film follows Myanmar resistance recruits
The festival opens Nov. 12 with the world premiere of White Tiger Column, directed by Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi, and Bryan Dickie. The Canadian documentary, screening in the international competition, follows a group of recruits through 45 days of training with Myanmar's resistance movement.
“In a training camp deep in the jungle, the filmmakers capture the daily lives of young volunteers as they prepare to fight for their freedom,” the synopsis reads. IDFA calls the film “a striking example of documentary cinema” and “a moving portrait of a courageous generation.”
Freedom is not an abstraction in this film. These are people picking up arms because the alternative is living under a military junta that seized power by force. That story deserves the biggest stage documentary film can provide.
What is in the IDFA 2026 international competition?
The International Competition brings together 13 films that, in the festival's words, “invite curiosity and critical reflection on our world today.” IDFA organizers said the films “offer complex, layered perspectives on the present.”
Most are world premieres. The lineup includes Tala Hadid's Bardi (Morocco), Mehran Tamadon's Crack in the Head, Crack in the Sky (France), Khadim Dai's Hazara Town, Isabel Joffily and Rita Toledo's Morro Grande (Brazil/Netherlands), Carol Nguyen's Still Night, Burning House (Canada), Elwira Niewiera's Women and War (Germany/Poland/Ukraine), and Louis Hothothot's The Year of the Ghost (Netherlands/China), among others.
The Envision Competition also screens 13 films, where “form drives the narrative,” according to IDFA. Memory is the running theme here; three titles in the section carry the word in their names, including Memories, Memories of Lightning, and Rivers of Memory. Lina Gorbaneva's My Own Personal Gulag also made the cut, a title that speaks for itself about where socialism leads.
Ukrainian medic documentary joins Luminous section
The premieres-only Luminous section presents 21 features and shorts that “grapple with big questions of life through deeply personal, lived experiences,” the festival said. Nineteen are world or international premieres and nine are debut features.
One standout is Sergii Bazhenov's Every Death Diminishes Me. Bazhenov trained as a medic to join Ukraine's front lines and documented his colleagues as they treat the wounded and confront the human cost of war. While Washington debates aid packages, this is what the fight actually looks like on the ground.
The section also includes Raluca Lupaşcu's A Modern Roma Fairytale, which follows Nicoleta, 10, the granddaughter of a Roma king, as she dreams of a life in a marble palace while watching the women around her work within patriarchal traditions. Hussein Al-asadi's She Was Not Alone, supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund, follows Zaira, an elderly woman living in the marshlands of southern Iraq.
Frontlight section takes on Iran and current events
The Frontlight section showcases 16 premieres, ranging from “critical examinations of the truth and urgent issues of our time to portraits of artists and their work,” organizers said. Several films, IDFA noted, “offer immediate responses to critical current events.”
Among them is Afsaneh Salari's Tehran, Under the Skin, which examines Tehran's cosmetic clinics and “the pressures behind Iran's widespread culture of cosmetic surgery in pursuit of physical perfection in a conservative society that seeks to control women's beauty.” American audiences get three entries here: Nathan Truesdell's A Derailment, Deborah Riley Draper's Romare Bearden: A Life in Collage, Emma V.F.'s Water Cooler, and Caron Creighton's Wood Street.
IDFA Forum adds 47 projects
The festival also runs its co-production and financing arm alongside the screenings. IDFA revealed 47 projects selected for IDFA Forum 2026, the festival's co-production and co-financing market, according to