Caspar Sonnen

Caspar Sonnen is the new media coordinator for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and curator of the festival's IDFA DocLab, a competition program for new forms of documentary and interactive storytelling.

Sonnen studied new media and film at Utrecht University. He has worked for film and media art festivals, as a freelance film journalist, and as a cinema programmer. In 2003, he co-founded Seize the Night, an open air film festival in Amsterdam. In 2005, Sonnen joined IDFA, developing several new digital festival initiatives, ranging from small online documentary storytelling experiments to the festival’s online documentary channel IDFA TV. He launched the IDFA DocLab in 2008, to showcase projects that use digital technology to expand traditional forms of documentary storytelling. The program quickly grew into an international platform for interactive webdocs and other new genres where digital technology and documentary storytelling converge. Since 2010, IDFA DocLab has also included an official competition program for digital documentary storytelling. In addition to IDFA DocLab, Sonnen also organizes guest programs at other
festivals, such as the Berlinale and SXSW Film & Interactive, as well as initiatives such as PhotoStories, a conference for multimedia photography, held in 2011.