IDFA announces 51 projects selected for IDFA Forum 2025

IDFA reveals 51 documentary projects selected for IDFA Forum 2025, from among 841 entries. The 33rd edition of the festival’s co-production and co-financing market takes place at a time when the world is grappling with multiple overlapping crises affecting every aspect of our lives: from escalating wars and conflicts to political turmoil, social and economic hardships, deepening inequalities, environmental damage—and our recurring failure to learn from the past. As an inherently political art form, documentary cinema has the capacity to explore and examine these issues with depth and nuance. The IDFA Forum carries their urgency into its latest edition, recognizing the need to give space to the vital realities and elevate voices exploring their complexities.

“The selection demonstrates how versatile the domain of the documentary filmmaker and new media artist is. Through the use of inventive cinematic language and formats, these projects bring underexposed stories while also exploring non-narrative expressions, both of which provide context in a society marked by turbulence and uncertainty,” said Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen, Head of IDFA Industry.

The line-up maintains gender balance across the formats. This year, 24 filmmakers will take the stage with their debut features. Production countries span all continents, with Europe in the lead, followed by Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Oceania. IDFA Forum takes place in Amsterdam’s Pathé City cinema, ITA, and @droog from November 16 to 19.

The Forum Pitch and Producers Connection feature a total of 33 projects this year. The selection includes notable filmmakers who make their return to IDFA. Mohamed Jabaly, whose Life is Beautiful scooped the IDFA Award for Best Directing in 2023, will present My Sister Gaza, co-helmed with his siblings Rima and Ibrahim Jabaly, and co-produced with Idioms Film, Palestine, with Elhum Shakerifar serving as executive producer. Punctuated by the rhythms of war, this collaborative film presents a poignant first-person documentation of the daily reality in Gaza in the early days of the genocide, as lived and chronicled by Rima and Ibrahim Jabaly. These scenes are continually entwined with conversations with their older brother, exiled filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly. Alexandru Solomon, whose multiple films have enjoyed screenings at IDFA (Cold Waves in 2007, Kapitalism: Our Improved Formula in 2010, and more recently, Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife in 2023) heads back to pitch Small Expectations, alongside executive producer Ada Solomon of microFILM. Unfurling during Romania’s electoral race, the documentary follows former civic activist Nicușor Dan who takes the helm of the troubled office.

A roster of emerging directors also bolsters the line-up. In Four Comrades, One Echo, Kiva Liu focuses on four sisters in China’s Sichuan, each of whom mothered her through different episodes in life. Leaning into the imagination spaces of shared story-writing and filmmaking, the sisters conjure up alternative selves, maintaining the sole bond that has sustained them in the politicized society. Sam Howard (Roisin Agnew’s The Ban, IDFA 2024) and Alexander Dickerson-Watson debut their feature The Video Guy. From a humble hustle shooting music videos for local rappers, the project morphed into a sprawling decade-long endeavor that follows five African-American youths set to become the next Kendrick, all the while quietly unpacking the hyperreal fantasies, projected onto—and in part perpetuated by the men—and the few paths open to them.

Among further notable standouts is Alison O’Daniel’s viscerally experiential and experimental Inframince (The Tuba Thieves, the IDFA Forum Award 2022 for Best Rough Cut, IDFA 2023) on the Havana Syndrome, the alleged “sonic attacks” on US diplomats, initially reported in Cuba. Stretching the possibilities of film, O’Daniel turns the subject into form, articulated “ecstatically and expansively” through a sensorial cinematic language. The inquiry into the mysterious phenomenon thus gradually unfolds into a cinematic probe of sound and its weaponization.

In Loretta van der Horst’s urgent The Documenters, the labor of gathering evidence of war crimes reveals the perils of “witnessing” along with the inequities of international justice. Taking an outward-facing approach that expands vast investigative work into an engaging and equally accessible form, it searches for new visual ways to engage with witnesses’ accounts and evidence collected in different conflicts, without compromising their veracity and the security of their holders. Another searing project comes from Javier Lovera. ExCoded (executive producer Ina Fichman, Intuitive Pictures Inc.) centers on the rise of facial recognition technology and surveillance infrastructures that have penetrated public spaces and personal lives, embedded across law enforcement, immigration systems, and schools, often escaping scrutiny. Vérité footage is layered with CCTV, bodycam recordings, and digital ephemera, shedding light on the pervasive presence of surveillance technologies, and how they are used to determine who is deemed innocent and free.

This year’s crop also features a number of titles that have previously been supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund, including Alyx Ayn Arumpac’s Tongues of Fire, Juan Pablo Polanco’s Trail on the Water, Luis Gutiérrez Arias and Zaina Bseiso’s Todo Lo Sólido, and Hao Zhou’s All Fixed Up.

Six projects have been selected for Rough Cut Presentations at this year’s IDFA Forum. Set to reach young audiences with relevance and heart, Lucas Paleocrassas’ Bugboy opens conversation about difference and self-acceptance through a gentle portrait of a teenager, George, with a rare eye condition that affects his self-image. Anchored in intimate, unobtrusive observational footage, the film takes a playful yet thoughtful approach to form, crafting cinematically stylized sequences that immerse the viewer in the world of crickets, which the boy retreats into for companionship. Among other standout projects is Nolwenn Hervé’s The Cord (a production of Estelle Robin You of Grande Ourse Films), set in Venezuela where giving birth is often a life-endangering act. At its center is an activist Carolina and her right hand Yanni, looking to open a birth house, a safe space for women that operates outside failing state structures. Meanwhile, a small car doubles as a makeshift ambulance, with tension mounting in its packed interior and the women’s bodies almost pressing against the camera. 

Exploring the themes of womanhood and coming of age, Dreams of the Wild Oaks by Bakhtiari director Marjan Khosravi and producer Milad Khosravi embraces elements of a fictionalized narrative and magical realism to subtly approach the sensitive topics of child marriage and environmental destruction in rural Iran. In the hybrid documentary, a 13-year-old Bakhtiari girl, Samaneh, faces an imminent marriage, bound to it by the ancient tribal tradition of ‘Khoon-Bas’. The events unravel as she nears menarche that marks her transition to womanhood. This sets her on the path of seeking out seven rare golden-winged partridges, which seems to be her only way out of the forced marriage.

The market’s new media strand IDFA DocLab Forum presents 12 projects in various stages of development and production. The selection spans diverse formats, including interactive narrative VR 360° (Amy Crighton and Meg Fozzard’s Cripping Up), multi-user VR game installation (Laura Yilmaz’s Metramorphosis), AR, AI, multimedia installation (Lara Baladi’s Anatomy of Revolution), live performance, AR multi-user VR room scale (Robin Coops’ Ghost Towns), and multimedia multi-user installation (Emma Hamilton’s Reframing Queer Exile), among others. The line-up showcases a range of inventive projects that engage with such themes as gender and sexual identities, war trauma, mobility, cultural heritage in the context of displacement and digital obsolescence, and perspectives on ecosystems.

Ambitious highlights include a multi-person, collective documentary VR experience, Fear City Paradise by Darren Emerson, the creator behind In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (IDFA 2022). Fear City Paradise takes us on a nocturnal journey, this time to the New York of the 1970s to meet the real people of Disco: the city’s Queer, Black, and Latino communities. Another noteworthy project comes from Marcel van Brakel’s Amasonic, which presents a living sound archive of the Amazon, gathered over the span of five years with tales and data from scientists and local communities. In the XR installation, the sound archive may be accessed from the perspective of a human or non-human lifeform inhabiting the river. Cutting the distance between self and the other, Yimit Ramírez and Tony Alonso’s The Eyes of Mila Kaos burrows into the mind of Mila Kaos, a drag queen in Havana’s underground shows and an empowering alter ego of a young actor, Tony Alonso, who formed her to cope with trauma from sexual assault.

This year’s IDFA Forum will welcome film teams, industry representatives, and observers from Sunday, November 16, to Wednesday, November 19. Affirming the crucial role of international co-productions as a key financing model for artistic documentaries, this year the Producers Connection Presentations will take place alongside the Forum Pitches as part of the same program on November 17 and 18 at ITA. This integrated setup allows all IDFA Forum accredited guests to attend the Forum Pitches and Producers Connection Presentations. Meanwhile, the Rough Cut projects will be presented on November 16 in the Pathé City cinema. The DocLab Forum Presentations are set for November 17 at @droog.

At this year’s edition, the IDFA Forum also launches new thematic Informative Panels that will offer filmmakers practical insights on navigating the documentary financing landscape. The sessions will take place as the IDFA Forum discontinues the conventional post-pitch feedback format. One-on-one meetings will remain integral to the Forum, allowing for in-depth discussions on creative intent, financing strategies, and potential collaborations.

Alongside the Forum events, IDFA’s premier market and distribution incubator for creative documentary films, Docs for Sale, runs concurrently from Saturday, November 15, to Wednesday, November 19. This year, Docs for Sale will be held at a new location in the heart of Amsterdam, Het Documentaire Paviljoen.