The Polar Star Films team has just returned from IDFA, one of the most important documentary festivals in the world and a must-attend for fans and professionals alike.

Now that they are back at their desks, we asked them which documentaries stood out and which were the best moments of the festival.

Among the documentaries, the team chose Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, USA / Germany, 2014); The Look of Silence, which premiered almost simultaneously in Amsterdam and Indonesia and ended with a Q & A with the extraordinary film director Joshua Oppenheimer; My Beautiful Broken Brain (Lotje Sodderland, Sophie Robinson, UK, 2014); The Salt of the Earth (Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Wim Wenders, Italy / France, 2013), which used a remarkable interview technique of projecting photographs in front of the camera; 35 Cows and a Kalashnikov (Oswald von Richthofen, Germany, 2014) and, finally, Something Better to Come (Hanna Polak, Denmark / Poland, 2014), winner of the Special Jury Prize.

The award for Best Feature-Length Documentary went to Man and War (picture still above) by Bécue-Laurent Renard. The jury recognized it as “a film that confronts us with our fragility as human beings, revealing that we must treat each other with gentleness and love”.

The festival is held at the same time as the documentary market where commissioning editors, broadcasters and sales agents meet with producers to arrange possible collaborations. Polar Star Films was present this time, as well as last year, when we were lucky enough to win the Moderator’s Hat Pitch. This year’s winners were the producer Sorin Manu and the director Stanca Radu, both Masterschool colleagues with our head of department Marieke. Congratulations!