Last year IDFA Amsterdam, which is the world’s largest documentary film festival, launched an award-winning campaign based on the truth: ‘You can’t make up reality’.This year the campaign continues with three new films, posters, catalogues and an online game.

The objective of the campaign was to get people interested in documentaries by showing them that reality is sometimes more absurd than you can imagine.

The commercials show ordinary people who are unaware that the harsh joke they are making is actually a true story featured in the upcoming documentary films of the IDFA.All the poster and print communications visualise the many documentary stories that might go through one's mind.‘The editing table’ online game challenged everyone to edit the stories of three documentaries that would be featured in the upcoming festival. The purpose of the game was to make people realise that reality is sometimes more absurd than you can imagine. It was very difficult to make the right choices and get the truth right. The whole idea of the game was that almost no one could make the correct edit straightaway because... ‘You can’t make up reality.’

Even in times of financial crisis, IDFA scored more visitors than ever.More people played the online game and the number of unique visits to the IDFA website doubled. The number of visited pages tripled and the time spent on the site increased by 150%.Research also showed there was a demonstrable increase in interest in documentaries in general and in the IDFA festival in particular. More people visited IDFA on tour in the rest of the Netherlands. There were higher IDFA DVD and merchandising sales.And, last but not least, more sponsors wanted to support IDFA due in part to the huge amount of free publicity the entire campaign generated in a range of media that even included the national news.