IDFA taps Kossakovsky for top 10

September 11, 2012 by Kelly Anderson

Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky is compiling his top 10 documentary films for the 25th anniversary of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which will screen alongside a retrospective of his work.

Kossakovsky’s selections, screening in the panorama program Reflecting Images, include Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Pavel Kogan’s Look at the Face, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, Nikolai Obukhovich’s Our Mother is a Hero, Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars, and Artavazd Pelechian’s Seasons of the Year.

Also part of his top 10 are Alexander Sokurov’s  Spiritual Voices, Herz Frank’s Ten Minutes Older, Ludmila Stanukinas’ A Tram Runs Through the City and Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death.

Kossakovsky’s films will also be screened at the festival, including Tishe!, Svyato, ¡Vivan las antipodas! and his latest three-minute documentary, made as part of the ‘Focus Forward‘ project.

The filmmaker will speak at IDFA about his own work and his top 10 picks, which according to Kossakovsky, are films that challenged him when he first saw them. His first doc, Belovy, debuted at IDFA in 1993, and nabbed the award for best feature-length documentary and the IDFA audience award. All of his following films have since screened at IDFA, and he has received financial support from the IDFA Fund for several of his docs.

The Reflecting Images program also includes the film Where the Condors Fly, a documentary by Chilean filmmaker Carlos Klein Frohlich that follows Kossakovsky as he filmed ¡Vivan las antipodas!

Other filmmakers who have programmed the IDFA section include Werner Herzog, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Steve James.

IDFA takes place this year from November 14 to 25 in Amsterdam.

Tags: Dziga Vertov, IDFA, Position Among the Stars, Reflecting Images, Victor Kossakovsky