Friday, November 24---Among the more than 2000 international guests expected at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA), which opened last evening, are veteran directors Michael Apted and Jennifer Fox, both of whom have new film projects making their debuts at the event.

Michael Apted, whose career has embraced both narrative and documentary features, will be giving a Press Conference on Monday, November 27 at the Salon de Balie, IDFA's headquarters. Apted will be represented at the Festival with the world première of MARRIED IN AMERICA 2, the second part of his ambitious series about the state of marriage in America.

The first film, MARRIED IN AMERICA, competed in the Joris Ivens Competition in 2002. Apted’s very first film, 7 PLUS SEVEN (1970), part of the director's acclaimed 7 UP series, is also screening in the First Films of Famous Filmmakers program. The most recent entry in the series, 49 UP, which follows the same group of people from age 7 to age 49, has been an international festival hit, with a recent screening at the New York Film Festival.

Pioneering documentarian Jennifer Fox will be giving a Press Conference on Wednesday, November 29 at the Salon de Balie, to discuss her ground-breaking six-part series FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN. Five women profiled in the the film will also be present at the press conference, including Amina Ahmed from Somalia and Kaltuma Ajab and Theresa Meyer from South Africa.

FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF A FREE WOMAN is a six-part series that takes a personal experimental approach to female life in the 21st century. The series narratively and visually interweaves aspects of filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s own life over three years – from 42 to 45 - with the lives of diverse and courageous women from around the globe. In ways that are both humorous and profound, the film searches for new models of femaleness, examining changing gender roles and the efforts of women everywhere to comprehend and define for themselves what it means to be a woman in these times.

Jennifer Fox has been a seminal documentarian not afraid of mixing genres and the public with the personal. For 20 years, Fox has been investigating and experimenting with the relationship of form to content and narrative to documentary, creating intimate portraits of individuals and families. Her first feature film, BEIRUT: THE LAST HOME MOVIE (1987), about a family in war-torn Beirut, won Best Documentary and Best Cinematography honors at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival. The 10-part public television series AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY (1999) focused on an interracial family and introduced her interest in the serial form as a way of examining all sides of an issue over a length of time.

Sandy Mandelberger
Online Festival Dailies Editor