Amsterdam Doc Fest IDFA to Celebrate Tatiana Huezo, Put Spotlight on William Greaves

Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo (Prayers for the Stolen, The Echo) will be the guest of honor at the 2026 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which takes place Nov. 12-22. In addition to the Huezo retrospective, the doc fest on Tuesday also unveiled a spotlight on pioneering U.S. filmmaker, producer, editor and actor William Greaves.

Plus, the festival said that it would wrap up its multi-year program “Dead Angle” with a focus on the theme Common Ground, following Borders in 2024 and Institutions in 2025.

IDFA said that its 2026 edition will also feature Huezo’s personal top 10 film selection and a talk featuring the filmmaker. Born in El Salvador and raised in Mexico, she “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,” fest organizers said. “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), 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 spotlight on Greaves (1926–2014) is designed to bring “a rediscovered voice in cinema back into view,” IDFA said. Across a formally inventive filmography shaped by sharp observation of social and political life, Greaves explored Black history and culture.”

The spotlight program includes Once Upon a Time in Harlem (2026), 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. Also featured are Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971), which turns a fiction shoot in Central Park into a self-reflexive study of a film crew in revolt, and a director’s cut of The Fight.

About the Dead Angle: Common Ground focus, meanwhile, will be “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,” IDFA highlighted. Among confirmed titles exploring solidarity in times of crisis are Everybody to Kenmure Street (2026) by Felipe Bustos Sierra, Shinsuke Ogawa’s The Battle Front for the Liberation of Japan – Summer in Sanrizuka (1968) and Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning American Dream (1990).

Finally, IDFA DocLab returns this year with the exhibition of what the fest described as “a diverse lineup of interdisciplinary immersive art and anniversary highlights to be revealed in the coming weeks.”