IDFA DocLab restores XR classics for its 20th edition
An Archive Arcade brings back landmark interactive documentaries in Amsterdam, alongside new work from Tamara Shogaolu, Ant Hampton and Polymorf.
- When
- IDFA runs Nov. 12 to 22, 2026. The DocLab exhibition is open Nov. 13 to 22
- Where
- IDFA DocLab, Amsterdam.
- Cost
- Free with reservations. Tickets go on sale Oct. 28
Interactive documentary has a preservation problem that games people will recognize: the work lives on dead plugins, discontinued headsets and expired certificates. So the most interesting part in the full DocLab 2026 program is the Archive Arcade, a room restoring landmark immersive works for the festival's 20th edition, including Thanatorama, Ana Maria de Jésus's piece about your own death and the first project DocLab ever selected. An arcade, in the literal sense, as the answer to media decay.
DocLab is IDFA's new media wing, founded in 2007, and it has spent two decades letting documentary borrow the grammar of games: branching choices, live simulation, audiences as players. The festival runs November 12 to 22 in Amsterdam, with the free DocLab exhibition at de Brakke Grond open from the 13th; reservations are free, and tickets go on sale October 28.
The two Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant winners both turn bureaucratic systems into things you play: Sanne De Wilde and Samir Veen's The Love Files puts you inside a "love file," the dossier the Dutch state compiles when a residence permit depends on proving a relationship, and Ant Hampton's All the Downtime drops its audience into an algorithm-run distribution center just as a power outage lets disorder in. From the Shared Realities research program come Tamara Shogaolu's The Invisible Woman, a VR opera recovering Francisca de Angola, a 17th-century Black woman in Amsterdam, and Polymorf's Microbiome Restaurant, which treats the human body as an ecosystem you can taste. Dries Verhoeven's Orgasmagoria screens at the sex theatre Casa Rosso, which is very IDFA.
The exhibition closes November 22.
From the DocLab 2026 selection. Images courtesy of IDFA
Killscreen covers the festivals where documentary, games and performance trade tools, before the retrospectives get there. The free Radar letter puts the next one on your calendar.
