Four projects awarded by the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant 2025

The annual Interactive Grant celebrates the ever-growing digital culture sector of the Netherlands. The partnership between the Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA DocLab underlines their mutual commitment to fostering new talent and supporting groundbreaking works in the interdisciplinary field.

"The selection is very diverse, ranging from media art to VR to even a project around the tactility of paper," says Netherlands Film Fund film consultant Michiel van Opstal about the selection. "Together, the projects embody the broad horizon of our digital culture, reflecting both its possibilities as well as the risks. All artists dare to make radical choices, which gives their work a distinct signature. Their engagement is not only present in the urgency of the themes they explore, but also in the original forms they chose."

"What stands out this year is how fluently these projects bridge digital and physical realities," says programmer Nina van Doren of IDFA DocLab. "They don’t treat the digital as somewhere else but make visible how it irreversibly seeps back into our bodies, spaces, and daily lives.”

To start his project Life Needs Internet in 2010, Jeroen van Loon published a website to gather letters based on one question: how does the internet influence your life? As a collection of handwritten letters—'the most Away From Keyboard medium,' as Van Loon puts it—the submissions document digital culture and its rapid changes in the last fifteen years. Over 1400 letters have been collected from all over the world by people of varying ages, backgrounds, cultures, and occupations. As a physical installation with hundreds of original letters and a series of video portraits, Life Needs Internet 2010–2025 displays personal stories that offer reflections on our use of the internet over the last decade and a half. That way, the installation invites visitors to answer the project’s underlying research question: Does life need internet? At IDFA DocLab 2025, visitors are invited to write their own letter to add to the growing archive.

In Feedback, un musical antifuturista, three entities inspired by Andean futurism invite the participant to drink a mystical brew. What follows is a psychotropic trip, leaving the safe space of their tipi behind, moving into ancestral sanctuaries and rituals in a sacred huaca. Reality begins to fall apart, and all bodies slowly dissolve into 3D objects. Together with the mystical avatars, the participant explores the new possibilities that come with these abstract forms. Feedback offers a spiritual journey across dimensions, held together by a musical format. The Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant supports Peruvian XR artist Claudix Vanesix to develop their VR project into a fulldome adaptation, in collaboration with Avinash Changa (of WeMakeVR), to be premiered at ARTIS-Planetarium during IDFA DocLab 2025.

The status of Sjef van Beers is the opposite of away from keyboard: using six gamer keyboards, he displays texts and animations scrolling through the backlit keys. The installation challenges the online stereotype of The Gamer. One that seems to be affiliated with culture wars from 2014's Gamergate to today’s 'manosphere' and incel communities. As a series, Gamer Keyboard Wall Piece peels off layers of male insecurities, mental health issues, and sociological structures at the core of the stereotype. Mixing online culture and feminist theory from different sources—books, video essays, tweets, and internet culture Van Beers collected through screenshots—the installation imagines a new identity for the gamer.

Entirely surrounded by large screens, participants in the group experience The Oracle: Ritual for the Future (For humans and non-humans) gradually surrender to a fusion of human, robot, and imagery. A guide (half human, half robot) leads an audiovisual choreography in which the group gradually relinquishes control to non-human entities. The immersive experience redefines the physical, with robots and AI-generated images reshaping ideas of sensuality, freedom of choice, and desires. This oracle does not offer a window to the future; The Oracle creates an entirely new framework, in which non-humans stir emotions and guide the flesh-and-blood participants in their own humanity.

For eight consecutive years, the Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA DocLab have joined forces to support immersive and interactive projects with international potential. The Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant annually awards artists based in the Netherlands.

Previous winners include artists such as Tamara Shogaolu, Studio Moniker, Anan Fries, Malu Peeters, Mathilde Renault, Dries Depoorter, and Maarten Isaäk de Heer. Following the premieres at IDFA DocLab, projects previously funded through this grant have received praise at prestigious international festivals such as SXSW, Sundance, CPH:Dox, Sheffield DocFest, and many others.

The full selection of IDFA DocLab 2025 will be announced in the following weeks. Sign up to the newsletter to receive program updates: