Dutch motion-picture director who filmed more than 50 international documentaries that explored leftist social and political concerns.

Ivens, who was educated at the Rotterdam (Neth.) School of Economics (1916–17, 1920–21), served as a field artillery lieutenant in World War I and later studied photochemistry in Germany (1922–23). In 1926 he returned to Amsterdam and joined the family business, but he left after receiving acclaim for two of his films, De Brug (1928; The Bridge) and Regen (1929; Rain). His successes resulted in an invitation to lecture in the Soviet Union (1930), where he made Komsomol (1932; Song of Heroes), which featured Communist youths who built blast furnaces.

In the Borinage area of Belgium he filmed Misère au Borinage (1933; Borinage), a depiction of a miner's strike. In Spain with the writer Ernest Hemingway he made The Spanish Earth (1937), an anti-Franco report on the Spanish Civil War. In China he produced The Four Hundred Million (1938), a documentary on the Sino-Japanese War. At the invitation of the U.S. government, he filmed The Power and the Land (1940), about the New Deal's rural electrification program, followed by Our Russian Front (1941). In 1944 he was named film commissioner for the Dutch East Indies, but he resigned in protest against Dutch colonialism and made the pro-independence film Indonesia Calling (1946), provoking Dutch authorities to rescind his passport for 10 years. His later films included How Yukong Moves the Mountain (1976) and Une Histoire du Vent (1988; A Tale of the Wind).