Participant in the MDAG Industry meetings.
Marije Veenstra (1977) is trained as a primary school teacher and Museologist. Since 2011, she has been bringing education and culture together at the Education Department of the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA), where she has been Head of the department since 2020.
With outstanding documentaries her team broadens the horizon of students and challenges them to learn and talk about different perspectives and film language. In addition, she wants to spark their love for film. That schools are also seizing this opportunity is evident from the fact that attendance has grown over the last decade from about 10.000 students to 50.000 students. The biggest success factor in this is that schools feel taken seriously. From Marije’s start at IDFA, she has always actively involved schools in the selection of the program and has worked hard to connect the offer to the curricula of the schools. She derives a lot of satisfaction from these successful forms of cooperation and has recently expanded this to the educational field, in which she has developed film educational programs with a number of stakeholders that are offered at a national level outside of the festival period.
From her position at IDFA, Marije is also involved in the selection of the IDFA Youth Competition and she composes the youth programs during the festival. Within the Youth Competition she tries to give creativity and ingenuity within the documentary genre free rein.
