The lineup for the 2026 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is taking shape, with the announcement Tuesday of more than 100 titles joining the roster.

The 39^th edition of the world’s largest documentary festival revealed selections across its Signed, Paradocs, Best of Fests, and Short Documentary Competition, and the first projects in its new media DocLab strand. IDFA runs November 12-22 in the Dutch capital, under the artistic direction of Isabel Arrate Fernández.

The Signed section, devoted to celebrating “those with a unique artistic signature, beyond the canon,” abounds with Oscar contenders: Ava DuVernay’s 14^th; Michał Marczak’s Closure; Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by David Greaves and produced by Liani Greaves, based on material shot by David’s father, William Greaves; My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile, from director Julia Loktev; Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, Luke Lorentzen’s Boatbuilders, and new work from Barbara Kopple (Union Town), Sam Pollard (Tutu), and Victor Kossakovsky (Holy Wood Dust).

The Signed category also includes two prominent shorts: They’re Here, directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller, and The Revolution Against Death, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

The Best of Fests section, presenting “the year’s most eye-catching and celebrated films from various festivals from around the world,” boasts almost 60 titles, including more Oscar contenders, among them Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution, The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, directed by Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama.

Scroll for more details on the IDFA lineup.

Paradocs showcases the year’s nonfiction film art, “in which visual artists and filmmakers present their explorations into non-fiction filmmaking,” the festival notes.

“This year’s selection of 16 titles explores the world through bold formal experimentation, genre-bending, and unexpected perspectives. A hedonistic escape to a melting glacier is interrupted by apocalyptic climate change and existential anxiety in Susanne Regina Meures’s Eternity— adapting of Florentina Holzinger’s performance art to the screen. In The Case Against Space, Graeme Arnfield offers a reconstruction of the first “strike” in space, reframing the astronaut hero through a critical lens on capitalism and surveillance. Johann Lurf’s Forever…Forever presents an overwhelming vision of the cosmos in motion, with an ever-accelerating timelapse of the sun’s path filmed over 22 months—to be shown on 70mm in Eye Filmmuseum.”

IDFA DocLab 20th anniversary

DFA’s new media program DocLab explores “how emerging technologies and new forms of interaction can expand what documentary can be and how audiences experience it.” Among the first projects unveiled are two participatory works that “turn systems that shape everyday life into audience experiences” for the 2026 Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant: The Love Files by Sanne De Wilde and Samir Veen, that invites audiences to step inside and critically review a “love file” application for a residence permit, and All the Downtime by Ant Hampton, immersing audiences in an algorithm-led distribution center, just as a power outage disrupts the order and gives way for creative disorder. Each receives €10,000 to finalize and present the work at IDFA DocLab.

The 20th anniversary program additionally features new works developed through Shared Realities, including Tamara Shogaolu’s The Invisible Woman, a VR opera that recovers the story of Francisca de Angola, a 17^th-century Black woman in Amsterdam, and Polymorf’s Microbiome Restaurant, with two sensory experiences exploring the human body as an ecosystem.

The IDFA Competition for Short Documentary “celebrates the versatility of the form, with 15 films that use creativity and imagination to push the boundaries of short documentary. Together, they form a mosaic of styles, themes, and perspectives, driven by ambitious directors with singular cinematic voices and strong artistic visions.”

IDFA Competition for Short Documentary

IDFA will announce final competition titles and its full selection on Tuesday, October 13.

EXCLUSIVE: YouTube creators Mackenzie Turner and Lael Hansen are launching their latest series exclusively on Tubi.

The Besties in Haunted High will debut globally on October 28 comprising six 30-minute episodes, following the online personalities as their school’s empty Halloween dance turns into a nightmare. They are trapped inside and have to complete six games and escape for a supernatural figure hunts them down.

The show is the latest from next-gen creator company Pocket.watch, whose slate has productions on the likes of Prime Video, Disney+ and Hulu.

Turner, Pocket.watch Chief Content Officer Albie Hecht and CEO and founder Chris M. Williams are the executive producers. Turner, Hecht and Carin Davis co-created the show, which was based on an original concept by Turner.

Collectively Turner and Hansen have over 13 million YouTube subscribers, with the former currently on 7.8 million and the latter 1.9 million. Their joint channel, The Besties, has 3.3 million, and is the basis for the show.

“Mackenzie has built one of the most engaged fanbases in the creator space, and The Besties in Haunted High reflects the caliber of premium, scripted storytelling her audience has been asking for,” said Hecht, who is also directing the series.

“The Besties in Haunted High is exactly the kind of storytelling that resonates with our audiences: authentic perspectives by creators that speak directly to their interests,” added Rich Bloom, General Manager, Creator Programs & Executive Vice President, Business Development at Tubi.

In a statement, Turner and Hansen said: “What started as a series our community fell in love with on YouTube is now reaching an even bigger audience through Tubi. Together with pocket.watch, we’ve turned it into a bold, creator-led series, free for everyone to watch.”

Pocket.watch is currently in production on three other creator originals: Love Diana: Music Hunters with Kids Diana Show, in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios, which launches on Prime Video in January 2027; a JJ & Mikey holiday special with gaming duo Maizen, which premieres on several premium platforms later this year; and Captain Future Pirate: Chedda Quest with creators DeeDee Show, Kaven Adventures, Caleb Kids Show, Kamden Boi & Kyraboo, and My PB&J. That debuts on on Ryan and Friends PLUS, pocket.watch’s subscription streaming service for kids.

Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, two Gen Z creatives-led horror stories, have proven the concept that viral online video creators can conquer the box office. And Pedro Pina, vp, YouTube, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), thinks that they will be followed by more successful moves from the online into the cinema world.

He shared that forecast on the opening day of the sixth edition of Iberseries & Platino Industria in Spain’s capital, Madrid, on Tuesday in a keynote appearance entitled “YouTube: The Strategic Ally of the Audiovisual System.”

“We can see that creators are defining and shaping the culture. As a result, the cultural impact that we have is phenomenal,” Pina touted. “And you also see, from a cinema standpoint, a huge impact. [The creators of] Obsession and Backrooms, as you know, were YouTubers who decided to go into the box office [business] … – and they were a tremendous success this year. And I would expect to see more and more of these examples [at] the Emmys and Oscars” in the coming years.

Pina on Tuesday also explained YouTube’s recent focus on positioning itself as a partner to media and entertainment content companies. “The objective of being here at this event, as well as so many others … is to really show up and really explain how our model works,” he highlighted. “The majority of people in the industry, unfortunately, don’t understand it as much, and that’s 100 percent our fault. We never spent enough time explaining to the industry how we work, how you can monetize.”

The result? “To a point, a lot of people were afraid of YouTube. They had fear of YouTube mostly because they did not understand how the platform works, how their content could be protected, how it could reach new audiences, and why it works to monetize,” Pina continued. “Once you start breaking down that information and providing examples and showing the way, you see more and more people starting to look at this. So we started this journey roughly three years ago.”

And YouTube has seen the benefit of making its narrative heard. “The amount of content uploaded by traditional players is increasing now,” Pina concluded.

Earlier in the Iberseries day, Amazon MGM Studios executives discussed the success of the Mercedes Ron young adult novel adaptations and Spanish zombie horror film Apocalypse Z, while Parrot Analytics shared data trends and estimates for the subscriber impact of Netflix’s Argentina hit series The Eternaut. The industry gathering runs through Friday.