Jørgen Leth to receive Lifetime Achievement Award at IDFA

Every week in October, IDFA announces new titles for this year's edition taking place 20 November – 1 December. A total of five Danish films have so far been revealed, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award to Jørgen Leth for his extensive and versatile body of work.

Tribute to Jørgen Leth

IDFA's Lifetime Achievement Award goes to the Danish documentarian for having "inspired generations of filmmakers with his strong auteur voice and fearless perspective on reality".

Jørgen Leth

Director, journalist, author, cycling commentator. Born 14/6 1937.

Growing up in Aarhus, Leth spent a lot of time at the local velodrome, where his uncle was manager, and he became fascinated by cycling.

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The 82-year-old director, poet, journalist, author, cycling commentator and much more has been a regular at IDFA over the years.

Jørgen Leth is renowned for a string of key works in Danish cinema since the early 1960s, from 'The Perfect Human' (1968) and 'Life in Denmark' (1972) to his 70s' cycling films 'Stars and Water Carriers' (1974) and 'A Sunday in Hell' (1977) and later classics like '66 Scenes from America' (1982), 'Haiti. Untitled' (1996), 'The Five Obstructions' (2003) with Lars von Trier and 'The Erotic Human' (2010) – and many more. 

The honorary award will be given during the festival. 

Fat Front in series about claiming your right

'Fat Front' by Louise Detlefsen and Louise Unmack Kjeldsen is selected for the non-competitive Frontlight series as one of twelve films touching on issues of equality and equal rights. 

The documentary follows a group of young Scandinavian women who have had enough of self-hatred and shame and proudly call themselves fat. They demand respect and recognition in a diet-fixated society while struggling with their own lack of self-worth 

'Fat Front' is produced by Hansen & Pedersen Film and Television. LevelK is handling international sales.

Strong titles fresh from Toronto

IDFA's latest announcement also includes Danish films in the non-competitive Best of Fests and Masters series.

Feras Fayyad's 'The Cave' is selected for Best of Fests, showing festival highlights from the past year. Fayyad's war doc from Syria won the Grolsch People's Choice Documentary Award at Toronto Film Festival and also received a strong response from the critics. An "intensely real and an ambitious, carefully wrought work of cinema", wrote The Hollywood Reporter, while IndieWire praised the film as a "frightening window into Syria's collapse".
 
'Love Child' by Eva Mulvad is selected for the auteur series Masters. Mulvad's portrayal of a family's journey from Iran to a better future was also commended at its world premiere in Toronto in September. "Eva Mulvad puts a human face on headline fodder — but it’s also an intimate, personal story of why people are forced to flee countries," said Rolling Stones.

Finally, 'Hunting for Hedonia' by Pernille Rose Grønkjær is also selected for Best of Fests. Premiering at CPH:DOX in March, the doc toured on to Toronto Hot Docs, Sheffield and Bergen film festivals.

Danish Documentary Production has produced all three titles.

Danish films and filmmakers at  IDFA 2019

The festival will be announcing more titles over the coming weeks. Here is a summary of the Danish films and filmmakers announced so far (8 October):

Lifetime Achievement Award

• Jørgen Leth receives honorary award for his complete oeuvre

Frontlight

• Fat Front by Louise Unmack Kjeldsen and Louise Detlefsen
  Produced by Malene Flindt Pedersen for Hansen & Pedersen Film og Fjernsyn

Best of Fests

• The Cave by Feras Fayyad
  Produced by Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjær for Danish Documentary Production
• Hunting for Hedonia by Pernille Rose Grønkjær
  Produced by Sigrid Dyekjær for Danish Documentary Production

Masters

• Love Child by Eva Mulvad
  Produced by Sigrid Dyekjær for Danish Documentary Production

Focus: The Villain

• The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer 
  Produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen for Final Cut for Real

Co-productions

• Khartoum Offside by Marwa Zein
  (Sudan, Danmark, Norge, Frankrig)
  Danish co-producer: Henrik Underbjerg for Stray Dog Productions
  Festival series: Best of Fests, Spotlight: Sudan
• The Kingmaker by Lauren Greenfield
  (USA, Danmark)
  Danish co-producer: Sigrid Dyekjær for Danish Documentary Production
  Festival series: Best of Fests, Focus: The Villain

Fat Front

Louise Detlefsen, Louise Unmack Kjeldsen, 2019

A revolution is happening in Scandinavia. This film is about young women who have had enough of self-hatred and shame and proudly call themselves FAT. They demand respect and recognition in a diet-fixated society while struggling with their lack of self-worth.

The Cave

Feras Fayyad, 2019

For the besieged Syrian civilians, hope and safety lie underground, inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave, where pediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above.

Love Child

Eva Mulvad, 2019

It is winter in Istanbul. A plane from Teheran has just landed. A couple, Leila and Sahand, have succeeded in fleeing Iran with their four-year-old son, Mani, without being arrested.

Hunting for Hedonia

Pernille Rose Grønkjær, 2019

An examination of the explosive development in "deep brain stimulation" (DBS). With permanent electrodes in selected areas of the brain, scientists can adjust abnormal activity and thereby normalise different kinds of psychiatric states. However, the method raises fundamental questions about what is normal, and how much we want our psyche manipulated with.

The Look of Silence

Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014

Through Joshua Oppenheimer's footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers. The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.