"AN ORDINARY COUNTRY" AT THE IDFA FESTIVAL

The first film previews of what awaits viewers of the IDFA festival have already been announced. This year's program of the prestigious Best of Fests section will also include a Polish production.

Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival IDFA is the largest and one of the most important documentary festivals in the world. Every year, it attracts over 280 thousand. viewers, including over 3,000 guests from the documentary industry, and the films shown at IDFA often later become festival favorites. This year, IDFA will be held on November 18-29.

Every year, the best films of the last season are invited to the Best of Fests section. One of 30 such high-profile and award-winning titles is the Polish "An Ordinary Country" directed by Tomasz Wolski. Below is a description of the documentary awarded at Vision du Reel and the Krakow Film Festival:

They were everywhere, trying to remain invisible. They filmed while hiding in restaurants, streets and shops. On one of the housing estates of single-family houses, they registered illegal fuel bottling. Another time, they captured the failed launch of the MIR (friendship in Russian) or Fidel Castro playing basketball with the Krakow team. They recorded a meeting of lovers in a hotel and an editorial meeting on Polish television, where journalists talked about propaganda. Sometimes the officers registered the interrogations, during which they blackmailed the interrogator and forced him to cooperate. On other occasions they tried to get detailed information about her daily expenses, including the type of meat and the amount of butter. They overheard the phone calls of a man with a friend in Oslo, from whom he ordered hemorrhoids ointment, which could not be bought in the country. They filmed riots in which people threw trash cans at them. They also recorded their own dramatic conversations during the siege of a militia station, which the strikers set on fire. The imprisoned asked for help that could not come.

All titles that qualify for the section can be found here.