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“I’m worried, Mom,” says preschool-age Jade, as she nuzzles her mother Betty’s leg in a down-at-heel backyard. When pressed as to the source of her worry, the answer is both plain and quite troubling: “I don’t know.” Inchoate anxiety and a wild, fanciful imagination vie for space in a young girl’s psyche in “I Love You I Miss You I Hope I See You Before I Die” — a deceptively whimsical title for a splintered, hard-bitten documentary study of life below the poverty line for three closely squashed generations of women in the suburbs and strip malls of Colorado Springs.

Shot in grainy, spontaneous fashion, Danish director Eva Marie Rødbro’s arresting first feature deftly toggles between rough everyday realities of financial strain, relationship trouble and drug abuse, and the escape mechanisms instinctive to each of her subjects: it may be My Little Pony fantasies for Jade and weed for her elders,...

Danish director Rødbro makes her feature directorial debut.

Toronto-based Syndicado has boarded international sales for Eva Marie Rødbro’s I Love You I Miss You I Hope I See You Before I Die.

The film has its world premiere tomorrow as part of Idfa’s Competition for First Appearance.

Danish director Rødbro makes her feature directorial debut after previously directing shorts such as Fuck You, Kiss Me, I Touched Her Leg and We Chose The Milky Way, and TV’s Simona Survives and Princesses From The Block.

The documentary is a portrait of life on the fringes of American society.

The 32nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) opened Wednesday with gender parity, inclusion, and young talent front and center.

Twenty-one year-old Canadian-Vietnamese director Carol Nguyen — whose short “No Crying at the Dinner Table” screens at the festival — kicked off the evening, reflecting Idfa’s commitment to young talent and women filmmakers. Nguyen said that she was optimistic about the position of women in film.

“Within the last few years alone, we have seen a rise of diverse representation in mainstream media,” Nguyen said. “Society and our audiences are more conscious than ever about the lack of gender and racial parity in film. Film festivals have even set gender parity goals for themselves. We are all demanding it.” Nguyen added that there is still a lot more work to be done, and that everyone must act together to achieve parity.

In his opening speech, Orwa Nyrabia, Idfa’s artistic director,...

Shoring up artistic director Orwa Nyrabia’s commitment to showcasing more women’s stories and platforming more women’s voices, Idfa has announced that this year’s festival features the highest percentage of female filmmakers in the event’s 31-year history: 64% of competition titles and 47% of the total program.

“Reaching a fairer representation was much easier than it seemed to be,” noted Nyrabia. “We only had to keep our goal in mind. The outstanding films that found their way to us this year was a humble reminder that we are in the presence of exceptional female filmmakers.”

The festival opens with the world premiere of Mehrdad Oskouei’s “Sunless Shadows,” which depicts five young Iranian women complicit in the murders of abusive husbands, fathers, or brothers-in-law. Oskouei’s film competes in the Feature-Length Documentary Competition alongside Jørgen Leth’s “I Walk”; Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez Fernández’s “In a...