Nigerian writer and film critic Oris Aigbokhaevbolo will be serving as a member of the jury for the 2023 International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) in Amsterdam which is slated to start on November 8.
The announcement comes months after he was named as an international voter at the 2024 Golden Globe. It also comes after a speech he delivered last month at the International Distribution Summit in Cologne, Germany.
Expressing his excitement at the invitation to IDFA, the largest documentary festival in the world, Aigbokhaevbolo said, “Its programming was always wonderful for both Western and African tastes. So I am quite honoured to be able to have a say in the festival’s list of winners this year. I thank the IDFA director, Orwa Nyrabia.”
He then acknowledged the role that Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, has played in his career. “Almost 10 years ago, the Rotterdam Film Festival chose me and three other writers to join its Young Critics’ Project. Now a different city in the Netherlands has asked me to be on its festival’s jury. If you say the Netherlands has supported my work over the years, you won’t hear me argue.”
At IDFA 2023, Aigbokhaevbolo, alongside producer and director Biljuna Tutorov, and writer and researcher Melissa Thackway, will choose the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award winner.
Aigbokhaevbolo is the only African film critic to have been invited to the film journalism programs in South Africa, Germany, and the Netherlands in a single year. The program is set to begin on Wednesday, November 8.
Aigbokhaevbolo has also contributed to a number of publications, including Sight and Sound, as well as the New York Review and the London Review of Books. He has reviewed films that have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival in the United States, FESPACO in Burkina Faso, and the Berlin Film Festival in Germany.
This year, Olga Chernykh’s A Picture to Remember, a movie related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, will open IDFA.