IDFA celebrates filmmaker Tatiana Huezo at IDFA 2026

IDFA is proud to present celebrated filmmaker Tatiana Huezo as the festival’s Guest of Honor. Born in El Salvador and raised in Mexico, 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. 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 pitched at IDFA Forum in 2021 and won the Best Documentary Award at Berlinale in 2023. 

IDFA presents a complete retrospective of her work, including several short films. Huezo also curated a personal Top 10 film selection, taking her interest in cinematography as a starting point to explore how the camera shapes our perception of reality. During the festival, an extended conversation with IDFA’s Guest of Honor Tatiana Huezo will be the centerpiece Talk of this edition. 

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 (2024) and Institutions (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 confirmed 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) poignantly 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 (2021), where his filming of casual encounters with passersby from his balcony becomes an intimate portrait of 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 a captivating 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 announced on October 13. 

Celebrating its 20th edition, IDFA DocLab looks back on two decades of pioneering interactive and immersive documentary art, while decisively 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 asking: In a world where it has become easier than ever to retreat into realities of our own making, can we still commit to sharing one?

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.  

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 spotlight includes the newly completed Once Upon a Time in Harlem (2026), an extraordinary 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.  

The 39th edition of IDFA takes place from November 12–22. Program announcements will follow throughout September and October. The final competition titles and full selection will be announced on Tuesday, October 13. Accreditations for press and industry professionals are now open. 

Since its founding in 1988, IDFA has grown into a leading international documentary institute that provides a space for exchange, collaboration, and inspiration—bringing together filmmakers, artists, audiences, and professionals from around the world. Its broad scope includes a public festival of films and new media, funding initiatives, markets, talent development, and education programs—alongside a year-round documentary hub in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark. 

• Photos of Tatiana Huezo and film stills are available here
• All press information is available at idfa.nl/press
• Press can register for accreditation here
• Key dates for professionals IDFA 2026
• Program presentation: Tuesday 13 October, 2:30 CEST

For more information about the IDFA 2026 film selection (preview films, interview requests, etc), please contact Lorenzo Ormando (lorenzoormando@idfa.nl).  

For press inquiries regarding the DocLab New Media program, please contact Michel Langendijk (michellangendijk@idfa.nl).

Dead Angle: Common Ground is supported by Vfonds.

IDFA DocLab is supported by: Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Creative Europe Media, Creative Industries Fund NL, Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition, Netherlands Film Fund, and Agog.