IDFA Project Space 2026: Project selection and tutor line-up announced

This year, sixteen projects have been selected for the 2026 edition of the program, spanning a range of cinematic approaches and themes, from intimate personal narratives to films engaging with urgent social and political realities. 

The IDFA Project Space program takes place from June to September online and at Het Documentaire Paviljoen in Amsterdam. Throughout the program, filmmakers share works-in-progress, exchange feedback, and work closely with internationally renowned editors, filmmakers, and producers.  

Participants will also reconnect during IDFA in November through IDFAcademy and the festival program, expanding their networks and continuing the development of their projects within the international documentary community. 

From June to September, participants work closely with tutors and peers through a combination of online sessions, one-on-one meetings, group discussions, and Filmmaker Talks—each designed to help the projects move further.  

June 
The program begins online from June 2 to 5 with conversations, meetings, and Filmmaker Talks designed to spark new ideas and create momentum. 

The June program includes a session with psychotherapist and documentary producer Rebecca Day. The program also features a Filmmaker Talk with Kumjana Novakova, who will reflect on her filmmaking practice as both an artistic research space and a political space. Her work has screened and exhibited internationally, including at MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, IDFA, and CPH:DOX. Her latest film, , won the Best Directing Award at IDFA 2023. 

Late June to July 
From June 28 to July 4, participants will meet in Amsterdam for an intensive in-person week dedicated to further developing their projects. Filmmakers will work closely with their assigned tutors through in-depth one-on-one sessions, while exchanging ideas and feedback with fellow participants. 

This year’s renowned tutors include editors Qutaiba Barhamji, Ollie Huddleston, Gladys Joujou; directors Tala Hadid, Suzanne Raes and Nicole Vögele and producers Malin Hüber and Bianca Oana. 

Set inside the iconic Vondelpark, the week in IDFA’s Het Documentaire Paviljoen extends beyond the formal program—through screenings, shared meals, and informal exchanges between filmmakers and tutors. The aim is not only to strengthen the projects themselves, but also create space for experimentation, reflections, and new creative breakthroughs. 

During the same week, filmmakers participating in the Dutch-language programs IDFA Project Space NL and will also kick off their program. These filmmakers, alongside the three selected filmmakers for the TalentScope program, will be invited to attend the week’s screenings and talks. 

September 
In September, participants reunite online for a final series of talks and meetings, reflecting on the progress of their projects and continuing the conversations sparked throughout the summer. 

During IDFA 
IDFA Project Space participants are also invited to attend IDFAcademy during IDFA in November, with a free accreditation to IDFA 2026. This offers the filmmakers and producers even more opportunity to connect with the international documentary field and continue to develop their project. 

Meet the selected projects of IDFA Project Space 2026. The selection spans a wide range of forms and themes—from intimate personal narratives to films engaging with urgent realities. 

Some of the project details remain anonymous for security reasons, to ensure the safety of the filmmakers involved. 

The Bamboo Family
Myanmar – dir. Sein Lyan Tun 

A Burmese filmmaker confronts his fractured identity and unspoken trauma through his body and memory, while attempting to reconcile with his parents. 

An Eventual Calamity of Time 
India – dir. Omkar Khandagale 

Realizing all that is left of his great-grandfather are the tools of his caste trade—a pair of scissors, a comb and a mirror—a filmmaker sets out for his hometown hoping to make sense of his family and their inheritance.  

Fear of an Ending
Denmark – dir. Alexander Rahmani Mannsteadt 

In March 2022, Alexander underwent heart surgery. Two years later, his mother, Soheila, also underwent a heart operation. The fragility of life and the fear of losing the person who means the most, have affected mother and son deeply, but in different ways. While Soheila finds it difficult to live to the fullest, Alexander feels a need to stop time and seeks to immortalize life and his mother with AI—as a solution to escape an ending.

Four Comrades, One Echo
Netherlands – dir. Kiva Liu 

Raised by four sisters as their only daughter, a filmmaker returns to Sichuan to "re-rehearse" a Mao-era propaganda opera with her mothers, transforming a state-mandated play into a vehicle of personal agency and a quest to understand the sisterhood that forged her collective upbringing. 

Invisible Labor 
Philippines – dir. Joanne Cesario 

Weaving archival footage and contemporary material, Invisible Labor follows aging activists with fading memories, a submerged community refusing to sink, a groundbreaking union strike, and a fragile archive revived—all fighting to preserve a movement that risked everything for the Filipino people. 

Kongo is Burning
Democratic Republic of the Congo – dir. Arnold Aganze 

Filmed over a decade in eastern Congo, Kongo is Burning follows two transgender women navigating love, exile, and survival in a society shaped by faith and repression, revealing queer resilience, memory, and the radical act of remaining visible. 

Morro Grande
Brazil – dir.  Isabel Joffily, Rita Toledo 

In a rural Brazilian community covered with pesticide-sprayed chayote vineyards, the suicide of his friend Vaguinho leads Rodolpho, a writer born there, to retell his friend’s life and death, from farmer to punk rock icon of their youth. Morro Grande traces forms of resistance within an idyllic landscape that hides an alarming vision of the future. 

One Day in The Future
China – dir. Xuannian Jiang, Ji Hang 

The logline for this project is not available for publication. 

Paper Tower
Guatemala – dir. Laura Garcia-Cordon  

Inside Guatemala’s shadowy eighteen-story Courthouse Tower, justice unfolds as a staged performance. Through cycles of waiting and repetition, judges, lawyers, guards, detainees, and a mother in search of truth inhabit an overburdened system, where time blurs and the law trembles on a fragile machinery. 

Reason of Seeing
Peru – dir. Silvana Alarcón Sánchez  

What deserves to be seen? Among family photos, blurred vision, and everyday fragments, a filmmaker traces a visual inheritance shared by three women—grandmother, mother, and daughter—living with the same eye disease. With performance, tactile images, and daily rituals, she searches for a way of seeing beyond sight. 

River of Creation
Netherlands – dir. Rosa Boesten 

When Shishani, a non-binary musician and anthropologist, discovers that their mother’s tribe once embraced a third gender, they return to their birthplace in Namibia. In their search for belonging through lost history, family, and loved ones, a question echoes: “What does it mean to come home to yourself, when that ‘self’ is constantly in motion?”

Sisters In War
Myanmar, Australia – dir. Lay Thida  

Two sisters, dreaming of a democratic and ethnically diverse Myanmar, leave their family to join the armed struggle against the military dictatorship—yet the real challenge awaits at home. 

The Slaughter
Switzerland – dir. Ben Donateo  

A story about people on the edge of society. A tale of parents, children, and trauma, suspended between dream and reality. 

Time is running loose
United States, Colombia – dir. Claudia A. Escobar 

El Tiempo Anda Suelto (Time is running loose) is a hybrid documentary that weaves personal archive, fictionalized sequences, and fantastical voiceovers, in which a grandmother’s voice from the afterlife connects three generations of women to explore migration, loss, and the folding of time. 

Unburied Memory
Belgium – dir. Yousef Nateel, Guillaume Vandenberghe

Unburied Memory is a found-footage documentary built from the only surviving copy of a Gaza archive spanning nearly a century, recovered from a hard drive beneath bombed Gaza's rubble. Once presumed lost forever, these rescued fragments reconstruct generations of Palestinian life threatened with erasure.

Waking Up in a Dream 
United States – dir. Jamil McGinnis, Pat Heywood

A child carries an Elder’s journal across Brooklyn in search of a mythical beach said to hold a forgotten secret.  Boundaries between memory and imagination dissolve as a collection of documentary encounters across the city transforms her journey into a shared dream. 

[Header film still: Morro Grande. Dir. by Isabel Joffily, Rita Toledo]