IDFA Award for Best Directing – International Competition:
The Kartli Kingdom
Dir. Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel

IDFA Award for Best Editing – International Competition:
December
Editing. Fernando Epstein

IDFA Award for Best Cinematography – International Competition:
Silent Flood
Cinematography. Ivan Morarash,. Oleksandr Korotun,. Viacheslav Tsvietkov, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk

Special Mention – International Competition:
Flood
Dir. Katy Scoggin

IDFA Award for Best Film – Envision Competition:
Past Future Continuous
Dir. Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani

IDFA Award for Best Directing – Envision Competition:
Holy Destructors
Dir. Aiste Žegulyte-Zapolska

IDFA Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution – Envision Competition:
Amílcar
Dir. Miguel Eek

IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction:
Feedback VR, un musical antifuturista
Dir. Claudix Vanesix for Collective AMiXR

Special Mention – IDFA DocLab for Immersive Non-Fiction:
Under the Same Sky
Dir. Khalil Ashawi

IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling:
Artificial Sex (Ep. 1 & 2)
Dir. Anan Fries

Special Mention – IDFA DocLab for Digital Storytelling:
Coded Black
Dir. Maisha Wester

IDFA Award for Best Short Documentary:
An Open Field
Dir. Teboho Edkins

Special Mention – Short Documentary:
Dreams for a Better Past
Dir. Albert Kuhn

IDFA Award for Best First Feature:
Paikar
Dir. Dawood Hilmandi

Special Mention – IDFA Award for Best First Feature:
The Kartli Kingdom
Dir. Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel

IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film:
My Word Against Mine
Dir. Maasja Ooms

Special Mention – IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film:
Paikar
Dir. Dawood Hilmandi

Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award:
Remake
Dir. Ross McElwee

Special Mention – Beeld & Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award:
The Memory of Butterflies
Dir. Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski

IDFA NPO Doc Audience Award
Cutting Through Rocks
Dir. Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni

FIPRESCI Award:
Paikar
Dir. Dawood Hilmandi

Mohammed Mrabet and Paul Bowles met by a beach in Tangier and began a relationship of ups and downs until Bowles death. Lasfar doesn’t say explicitly if there was a sexual affair between them but given Bowles’ bisexuality and Mrabet’s gift for fabulism, who’s to say?

The time and place certainly encouraged wanton behaviour. As did the expat literary community, which included Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg.  “Those terrible Beat writers”, as one interviewee calls them.

But Lasfar has eyes only for Mrabet and Bowles. The American writer is impressed by the former’s storytelling ability but knows there is no real commercial appeal for something that is merely recited to whoever is willing to listen.

There’s no real suspense as to how the story is going to develop. Within the first 20 minutes, it is already obvious that a subplot of exploitation will turn up. And it certainly does.

Bowles soon begins to translate Mrabet’s stories, turning them into books that can be sold. The books appear to have done reasonably well but Mrabet says he never got royalties, and he may not have gotten anything if Bowles wasn’t nudged. In the end, he received 2800 dollars. Not exactly a terrible sum back in the day.

Mrabet was not a saint either. He stole from Bowles, who seemed to have treated his thieving as something more or less normal. It is hard to tell if his not making a fuss over the theft was because he was old and frail, or felt guilty, or as compensation for the younger man’s company. His companions from that time, a handful of whom speak to Lasfar, appear still aghast at the theft and Bowles’ resignation.

That disapproval of Mrabet’s actions leads to some of the film’s tastiest lines in a documentary that’s rather bland. One person refers to Moroccan culture as one that encourages deceit, another person backs it up. Bowles himself wasn’t too fond of the locals, even if he said it was possible to “like them en masse and approve of their existence”. A publisher of Bowles’ translations is asked if he considered dealing directly with Mrabet but he doesn’t seem to have given that a thought; he considered the illiterate author a troublemaker. He also adds that Moroccan Arab culture has “a lack of empathy”.

Lasfar leaves all of us this in and doesn’t add any sort of commentary, which is a relief. But there is a chance for a combustible documentary that we never see. In any case, the men behind those words are of an earlier era, but their plainspoken nature is refreshing. They feel no need to demonstrate their goodness by posturing.

Their words do not elevate the documentary to must-watch territory but it might provide a certain type of viewer some satisfaction to see people say exactly what they are thinking. Educational entities will find Mohammed & Paul useful, especially if Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky is somewhere in the curriculum. For everybody else, maybe read that novel? And then maybe see the documentary.

Director: Nordin Lasfar
Producer: Jos de Putter for dieptescherpte
Cinematography: Jean Counet, Jackó van ‘t Hof, Aziz Al-Dilaimi
Editing: Thomas Vroege
Sound: Benny Jansen
Sound Design: Alex Booij
Music: Vincent Van Warmerdam
Distribution (Netherlands): Rieks Hadders for Mokum Filmdistributie

Chris, an energetic Zimbabwean 65-year-old, is dealing with an unfavourable economic situation in Botswana that has led him to become a casual worker. We see him as he goes about his business, his hustling intended to raise enough money for the burial of his father’s remains, his dad having died young, a victim of Robert Mugabe’s need to crush his enemies. In scenes where he speaks to the camera (and Kadandara) about the need to get his finances right, you can see the strain in his body language. Every single thing appears to be put on hold for the burial.

One of those things put on hold is marriage, which is how Dumi, his lover for several years, comes into the picture. Much of their relationship appears to be typically traditional, even as Chris says that he was treated a lot more royally back when he was quite liquid. Dumi, though, is a joy on camera, and perhaps in life. Her eyes light up when she smiles, and she looks like the type of person who doesn’t hold a grudge. It’s easy to understand why the rather brusque Chris is with her. Though charming Chris long enough to get him into bed doesn’t seem too hard, given the endless number of children he has fathered with several women over the years, as one comical scene shows. Unfortunately, Dumi’s agreeable nature may also be why she hasn’t left a man who, frankly, doesn’t want to put marrying her on top of his list of priorities.

This will-they-won’t-they set-up should be enough for a compelling documentary but this is an African documentary funded by western institutions. This means romance isn’t enough; the subject must be politics. So, right from the start of the film, we are introduced to the bloody political precursor to Chris’s need to bury his father. Back in the 1980’s, Mugabe had waged a mass killing, referred to as the Gukurahundi, to force a transformation of Zimbabwe into a one-party state. Chris’s father was one of the casualties.

But while this is a helpful background to understanding what lies behind Chris’s quest, one gets the sense that the man himself is more concerned about the implications of a man being unable to bury his own father and not necessarily the larger interplay of high-level politicking that led to his current situation. Luckily for Chris, there is an organisation created to give families an opportunity to say goodbye to family members lost during that particular civil war. The film’s most touching scene involves such a goodbye.

It is to Kadandara’s credit that the politics of Matabeleland blend in quite nicely with the life of her main character. The film, therefore, has two wonderful things going on: its compelling leads and the supple freshness of its tone. There is death and burial involved but this is not one of those harrowing documentaries about the dark continent. And when the film closes with a note informing us of the possibility of matrimony, you may feel your heart leap for joy. Matabeleland may be a first feature but Kadandara handles business like a pro. Audiences at festivals, schools, and at home everywhere would agree.

Director: Nyasha Kadandara
Cinematography: Nyasha Kadandara
Editing: Jordan Inaan
Producer: Sam Soko for LBx Africa
Co-producer: Bob Moore for EyeSteelFilm
Sound: Nyasha Kadandara
Sound Design: Benoît Dame
Music: Eduardo Aram

This time the Englishman, director Marc Isaacs, shows up only occasionally on the screen but he does have a watchable aura. In any case, the film isn’t about him or may not even be about a human being. Isaacs has made a documentary film about artificial intelligence. Which should be simple enough, but he has also whipped in artificial elements like fiction into what is ostensibly nonfiction. The result is about as pleasing as it is confounding.

Isaacs appears to be approached by a new tech facility seeking to add life to its creations by adopting building blocks from documentaries he has made in the past. In return, Isaacs would get some understanding of how AI works. This is what Synthetic Sincerity is about. But only on the surface. The film is layered with shenanigans, some of which work, some of which go from frustrating to tolerable.

In the latter column: what is going on overall? For example, there is a glimpse of Uyghur and China politics and a question of whether AI can allow people to express things they ordinarily can’t. But that is a subject that a barely 60-minute documentary with other things on its mind can never hope to address to a degree that’ll satisfy even a half-interested viewer. The discussion, a diversion really, comes across like something that was included in the story because Synthetic Sincerity might otherwise come across as too slight.

In the former column: quirky exchanges between Isaacs and the AI’s winsome avatar. Onscreen, Isaacs has an endearingly unsure way of speaking, like a rain-beaten Hugh Grant. Where he stumbles out his intentions, the AI’s avatar is firmer. Their dynamic is not unlike what you’d get in a British romcom. Well, except that the alert viewer should have one question at the back of their mind: how exactly is the avatar aware of what is happening in Isaacs’ daily life?

The film does answer that question and does so humorously. But it doesn’t exactly land as well as it should have. The problem is that Isaacs and his co-conspirators (chiefly his writer Adam Ganz) weren’t so committed to mangling the answer to the film’s main query: what does truth mean when the human face is itself a lie? At some point, the lines between what is “actual” documentary and what is fictional in the film are tangled so much that the distinction becomes rather meaningless. Isaac does give the game away at some point in the last act but Synthetic Sincerity remains a film that should probably lead the viewer to seeking out an interview or two in a bid to find out what is true and what isn’t.

Isaacs is smart to understand, perhaps intuitively, that with all of these layers and layers of artifice in a documentary about artificial intelligence, an undoubtedly real-life person like himself is something of a masterstroke. It is why the documentary will do well on the festival circuit in the UK, US, and Europe: an affable man pops up from time to time to give the audience something lightly humorous to connect to. Of course, it helps that AI is also the topic du jour.

But the film should come with a warning: find and read an interview with the director after viewing.

Director: Marc Isaacs
Screenplay: Adam Ganz
Producer: Marc Isaacs for Marc Isaacs Films
Cinematography: Marc Isaacs
Editing: Marc Isaacs, David Charap
Sound: Sarah González Centeno
Sound Design: Dan Weinberg
Music: Yahli Lev
World Sales: Andana Films
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
71 minutes
In English

Fares previously made a short profile documentary about Eliassi, Reckoning With Laughter (2019), for Al-Jazeera. But this full-length feature is a much more ambitious and emotionally spiky affair, exploring the fraught question of how left-leaning artists and peace activists deal with the horrors of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza. There are no easy solutions here, but plenty of food for thought, and some cautiously optimistic glimmers. After a prize-winning festival run, this extremely timely film makes its Dutch premiere at IDFA this week, and seems sure find a wider audience on big or small screen,

Calling herself a “poster child of coexistence”, Eliassi was born in Israel to an Iranian-Jewish mother and a Romanian-Jewish father whose parents fled the Holocaust, “woke progressive leftists” with a simple belief in equality between Israelis and Palestinians. She spent her childhood in Neve Shalom, aka Wahat as-Salam, which translates as “Oasis of Peace”, a culturally mixed cooperative community midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Farsi and English, her long-time best friend from school is an Arab woman, Ranin. The duo even became part of the village’s official welcoming committee for famous visitors like Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton and the Dalai Lama,

A peace activist since her teens, Eliassi worked at the UN before turning to comedy full time. Fares is on hand when she lands a fellowship at Harvard University in 2019, where she starts work on a one-woman stand-up show about Israeli-Palestinian relations, which she delivers in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Edgy material about terrorism and occupation sit alongside more familiar Jewish-themed jokes about food, family and the pressure to get married, not always comfortably.

Politically, Eliassi is already losing faith in Israel’s complacent liberal centrists before the October 7 attacks, joining angry protest marches against Netanyahu’s “fascist” policies and sharing robust but cordial debates with more conservative speakers on TV. Her attacks on “normies” who “want democracy for Jews only” earn her plenty of enemies, as does her satirical TV spoof song “Dubai, Dubai”, which criticises the indifference of other Arab states towards Palestinian suffering. Even so, she mostly relishes these clashes, disarming her critics with self-effacing humour and snappy comebacks.

But the Hamas massacres and their aftermath inevitably shatter Eliassi’s brand of progressive idealism. After the attacks, Fares shoots her sobbing, despairing and numb. Some of her own friends are killed on October 7. “It’s impossible to grieve for so any people we know”, she says. Meanwhile, she sees loved ones and family members turn vengeful and bitter, abandoning the compassion they would once have felt for innocent Palestinian victims in the Gaza war zone. Jonathan Silver, the son of murdered peace activist Vivian Silver, proves sympathetic to her case. But others call her a traitor and an enemy, “you hate your own people”.

Coexistence, My Ass! concludes with as much sunshine as it can muster, revealing positive developments for Eliassi in both her career and personal life. She is back onstage with a revamped version of her stand-up show, but her jokes have taken on a harder edge, much like her political statements. “The elephant in the room used to be the occupation,” she explains. “Now the elephant the room is genocide”. Not exactly a happy ending, but not hopeless either, an inspirational example of how terrible events can still provoke warm-hearted humour and a rare, fragile but courageous empathy.

Director: Amber Fares
Screenwriters: Rachel Leah Jones, Rabab Haj Yahya
Cinematography: Amber Fares, Philippe Bellaïche, Amit Chachamov
Editing: Rabab Haj Yahya
Music: William Ryan Fritch
Producers: Amber Fares, Rachel Leah Jones, Valérie Montmartin
Production companies: My Teez Production (US), Home Made Docs (Isreal)
World sales: Autolook, Vienna
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
In English, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi
95 minutes

Touching on exile, displacement, domestic violence and the brutal close-up realities of people-smuggling gangs, A Fox Under a Pink Moon could have been a gruelling, issue-heavy film. But instead it is a mostly life-affirming exercise in empathy, bleak in parts but also bursting with creative imagination and defiant optimism in the face of impossibly steep odds. Of course, it helps that Soraya is a natural screen star: young, beautiful, artistically gifted and wiser than her tender years, with a flair for lyrical insights into geopolitics. Following its world premiere at IDFA this week, this formally bold documentary should have further festival and niche sales appeal thanks to its plucky protagonist, stylistic flair and timely themes around gender inequality and immigration,

We first meet Soraya in Istanbul in 2019, where she is in the middle of a “game”, as refugees call their attempted border crossings. Like most of the escape attempts in the film, it is a hectic blur of extreme discomfort and nail-biting tension, hunger and sickness, with police beatings, bandit attacks and high failure risk all part of the deal. Between botched escape attempts, Soraya returns to Tehran and fills us in on her tragic back story. Her beloved father died when she was five. Her mother fled to Europe, and the pair have not seen each other for years. Meanwhile, she is locked in a loveless marriage with hot-tempered, violent Ali “Ever since my father died, I have gotten used to being beaten,” she shrugs as she displays her latest black eye and bruised shoulder on camera. At one point, she confesses to feelings of suicidal depression, but leaves them opaque.

One key lifeline that sustains Soraya is her richly creative inner life. A talented painter and sculptor, she and Oskouei make her artworks central to the film, not just as decorative counterpoint but as symbolic chorus motifs woven into the wider narrative fabric. In collaboration with animator Mohammad Lotfali, her stylised fox and clown paintings become brightly coloured Expressionist tableaux, surreal and macabre and highly imaginative, like miniature Tim Burton movies. These striking artworks also serve as avatars for her distressed emotionally state. “I don’t talk any more, I paint my pains”, she claims at one point. “I turn my fears into a demon sculpture”.

Often these animated graphics also serve as dark commentary on wider background events, including refugee boats sinking in the Mediterranean, and escalating violence in Afghanistan after the chaotic withdrawal of US forces in 2021. One of her animated artworks angrily depicts the Taliban’s brutal lynching of comedian Nazar “Khasha” Mohammad, another desperate Afghans falling to their deaths after swarming the last US military plane to fly out of Kabul. “Ordinary people have no place in this world,” she concludes. “No plane is waiting for them.”

Episodic and disjointed, A Fox Under a Pink Moon chronicles a messy work-in-progress life story in an appropriately scrambled, unvarnished manner. The lack of explanatory context will likely frustrate some viewers, and certainly there are some niggling omissions here. The final credits include significant updates on Soraya’s current location, marriage and family issues which all deserve more than just a perfunctory mention. This story needs a closing coda, or even a sequel. Maybe Soraya will direct one herself, bursting with darkly beautiful animated visuals, and Tim Burton as executive producer.

Directors: Mehrdad Oskouei, Soraya Akhalaghi
Screenwriters: Mehrdad Oskouei, Amir Adibparvar
Cinematography: Soraya Akhalaghi
Animation: Mohammad Lotfali
Editing: Amir Adibparvar
Sound: Soraya Akhalaghi
Sound Design: Hossein Ghoorchian
Music: Afshin Azizi
Producer: Mehrdad Oskouei
Executive producers: Siavash Jamali, Tony Tabatznik, Rebecca Lichtenfeld, Chandra Jessee
Production companies: Oskouei Films (Iran), InMaat Foundation (US)
World sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Farsi, Dari, Turkish
76 minutes

The brand of wrestling here is similar to what you get with the WWE, only with much more basic production values. The setting, after all, is a small community in the Congo, a poor African country. As with that American staple, catch wrestling, as it is called, comprises a series of entertaining slapstick battles with heroes, villains, and made-up storylines, but the injuries, the aches, the pains, are very real. After one show, director Derhwa Kasunzu shows us scenes of recovery and treatment. There are massages, stiches, and attendant groans.

None of the wrestlers shown are rich, their hardened faces telling a part of their stories. But this isn’t quite a story about African privation, that eternally trendy subject. It is instead a story about a band of two men and one woman who have devoted their time and energies to an activity that, while still of some utility to an audience of devotees, has had a lot of its commercial viability vanish in recent years. Switch some of the elements, adjust the degree of decline, and Kasunzu could be telling a story about the state of traditional media businesses in 2025 or any other activity with fading profitability. A few festivals across Europe will find some benefit in programming this documentary, especially in French-speaking territories and if paired with other projects from sub-Saharan Africa.

In any case, Wrestlers is aware that its subject is as much business as it is corporal. We see a split scalp, some wrinkled skin, even a weaponised breast. But these images are neither graphic nor pornographic. They just are. It’s tempting to characterise Kasunzu’s camera as loving but that isn’t quite right. The film’s visuals do not pass any commentary on its images—not in the way the sheer existence of the documentary does. So that if Kasunzu didn’t train his camera on this subject, people outside of the it may not have existed at all, and the sport it documents might be forgotten in a few years. As one scene shows, not even Kelekele’s family has a surfeit of photos from his illustrious past. A similar thing may happen to the band seeking to immortalise their hero, but, at least, they have a film about their latter-day exploits.

The film’s ending leaves a lot to be desired but maybe there is a logic to its roughhewn conclusion. Go much further and the documentary becomes an unvarnished tragedy. Elegies, after all, sing of a death. But these characters deserve better.

Director: Derhwa Kasunzu
Screenplay: Derhwa Kasunzu
Cinematography: Pierre Maillis-Laval
Editing: Aurélie Jourdan
Sound: Corneille Houssou
Sound Design: Théo Carlinet, Pierre-Emmanuel Guinois
Music: Flamme Kapaya 
Producer: Berni Goldblat
Executive producer: Berni Goldblat
Production companies: Les Films du Djabadjah (Burkina Faso)
World Sales: HAabebo Studios
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
In Lingala, French
63 minutes

Working heavily from an investigative piece by German publication Handelsblatt, German director Andreas Pichler presents the case against Tesla, one of the main businesses synonymous with the Musk name. He is chiefly interested in its self-driving claims and the harm that claim has done. To listen to Musk on the subject is to hear a creation of Silicon Valley declare that what his company has built will save lives. But that may not be quite the whole story because as one interviewee puts it, “Silicon Valley is a heat-seeking missile to money”. Saving lives is fine but Tesla has its share price to worry about.

In presenting his case, Pichler juggles the rise of Musk – shockingly boyish in some of the footage here – with an account of the survivor of an accident who lost his girlfriend after a self-driving Tesla failed to take a turn. Former staffers speak about the world’s richest man and his car company, comparing Tesla’s early business model to a pyramid scheme. They raised cash as though they had made a certain number of vehicles, while hoping they could succeed in making up those numbers from the cash raised.

To hear these former staffers is to marvel at the moral apparatus in the company. To hear them is also to get an idea of the moment Tesla switched from a company making cool cars to one with an appetite to take over the automotive industry. It began with the Model S sometime in the early 2010s. It may also be the time that Musk physically transforms into the form we know at the moment, although one former staff says that even in the early days “we oftentimes did ask ourselves if he was human”. The jury might still be out on that one as we see in one rather robotic 2024 interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Unfortunately, there are very real consequences for Musk’s self-proclaimed ambitions. By releasing cars with still developing technology to the market, he has turned buyers into beta testers endangering their own lives and the lives of others. Unveiled shows that Tesla does know that claiming utter safety in the marketing of its self-driving cars is fibbing. It is, however, committed to denying culpability when the inevitable crashes occur.

Pichler presents this case convincingly, giving his documentary its surest footing. The whistleblower responsible for the Handelsblatt article shows up on camera, as do former employees who didn’t quite keep unsavoury company info to themselves, leading to less than graceful employment terminations. These persons give the documentary its most damning dimensions with regards to the business and tech of Tesla; the surviving boyfriend and his late girlfriend’s sister give the film its emotional resonance.

There’s a political angle as well. But this is where the film enters murky waters. One person says the Trump/Musk alliance was a move to essentially buy out the US government. Which is probably not a problem in a documentary of this sort — but it’s not hard to begin to suspect that even more extracurricular concerns would show up, the most of egregious might be the decision to include the controversial Nazi-or-not- Nazi salute from Musk following Trump’s electoral victory.

Thankfully and admirably, the footage is not editorialised. In putting up these political bits, the documentary misses the chance to offer a statistical comparison on safety levels between the Tesla and non-self-driving cars or even between Tesla and other self-driving cars. The latter is addressed briefly in the second half with the mention of Musk’s rejection of Lidar, a technology that some car manufacturers endorse, but there are no numbers to add width for non-technical viewers.

Ultimately, Unveiled is a serviceable investigative documentary. It will certainly find its audience everywhere in the world – Elon Musk will remain a commercial draw for a mighty long time – but would it show in the US? At IDFA, where the documentary premiered last night, the film’s director and producer couldn’t say for sure. No surprises there.

Director: Andreas Pichler
Screenplay: Andreas Pichler, Anne von Petersdorff, Christian Beetz
Producer: Christian Beetz
Executive producers: Yara Hueck Costa, Anne von Petersdorff, Martin Pieper
Cinematography: Jakob Stark, Tom Bergmann
Editing: Johannes Hiroshi Nakajima, Beatrice Segolini, Nicolas Nørgaard Staffolani
Music: Henning Fuchs
Production company: Beetz Brothers (Germany)
World Sales: Mediawan Rights
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In English, German
90 minutes

Even when you have read the blurb about the film before seeing it. Even when the narration – which appears on screen as text in both English and Arabic – gives an early trigger warning about the nature of the stories it contains. The film is composed of a series of accounts of cruelty suffered by three sisters and recounted by one of them. “Always remember this is your place,” her older brother tells her at one point, “Under my shoe.” These instances of everyday barbarism are intensified and undercut by Jo’s experimental presentation.

The film strings together these scenes to form a fragmentary narrative of abuse. They are set against a patchwork visual track that flits from subject to subject, overlaying a blade of grass being buffeted by the wind with a rose-red sunset or the explosions of celebratory fireworks. If it wasn’t for the text on screen, they would combine with Rami al Jundi’s rhythmic score to form some hypnogogic reverie. Here, they act as a counterpoint, but one that seems to stand in defiance of the dehumanising treatment that has inspired the film.

At one point, the filmmaker quotes a verse: “You resume that you’re just a small body, but you contain the entire universe.” In that context, she is trying to grapple with the way that the marks of physical violence fester and sink below the skin, scarring deeper than we can imagine, creating a bottom pit inside us. However, as Jo’s luminous visuals attest, there is a way out. This tactile and stomach-churning documentary comes to represent that – a defiant middle finger bathed in golden hour light.

Director, screenplay, editing, cinematography, sound: Lujain Jo
Music: Rami al Jundi
Venue: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Competition for Short Documentary)
In English
18 minutes

Read more of our short film coverage over at Verdict Shorts

This is, after all, a non-fiction film about the life of an elite-level show jumping horse, Legacy, who is ferried around the world for competitions and photo shoots. Linders’ film feels primarily intrigued by the way that Legacy is treated as an A-list celebrity, living a life of chartered flights and photoshoots, but the film also verges into more interesting territory as a portrayal of labour and isolation, even if the film never quite manages to find a way to land this insight.

What is certainly true is that Linder keeps the footage of Legacy fairly restricted to downtime. From shots of trees swaying through the stable door, to a bit of light exercise on a treadmill and the aforementioned airborne journeys in which Legacy is chartered around Europe attending glamourous events. Aside from a few still photographs of Legacy and a rider elegantly vaulting a fence, the closest we get to the arena itself are some choice moments backstage before the rapturous applause.

It’s difficult while watching the film not to bring to mind that genre of film that explores the loneliness and ennui of celebrity. At one point Legacy’s owner observes “what a privileged life my girl leads” while laying out an itinerary that goes from Belgium to Switzerland, before taking in Dublin, Windsor, Barcelona and Paris. However, the in the quotidian we are perhaps invited to reflect on that supposition. A brief interlude with a dog hints at a stranger and deeper direction never fully committed to, but Air Horse One is compelling viewing all the same.

Director, screenplay: Lasse Linder
Producer: Philipp Ritler
Cinematography: Robin Angst
Editing: Daniel Loepfe
Music: Moritz Widrig
Sound: Jean-Francoise Levillain
Production company: Dynamic Frame GmbH (Switzerland)
Venue: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Competition for Short Documentary)
In English
21 minutes

Read more of our short film coverage over at Verdict Shorts

Esteve’s subject, and key narrator/collaborator, is Mailin Gobbo, a thirtysomething Argentinean woman who spent years living with crushing shame and depression after she was sexually abused as a child by Carlos Eduardo José, a Catholic priest and family friend who worked at her school. In 2017, after being stonewalled by church authorities, who protected José from his accusers and even continued paying his salary, she finally reported his crimes to the police. Esteve punctuates her film with footage from the dramatic court case that followed, though she is much more interested in the adult Mailin’s therapeutic soul-searching and ongoing recovery than in the specific abuse case.

Esteve spent years building trust with Mailin for this documentary, and their close creative relationship pays off in the intimate, confessional tone. Framing the narrative as a dark fairy tale about a “beast” who disguised himself as a lamb, Esteve opens with Mailin calmly re-telling her life story to her five-year-old daughter Ona. The director approaches these delicate events from a non-linear angle, peeling away layers of protective amnesia, piecing together a shattered mosaic of memory, zooming in on grainy, glitchy, slow-motion video clips for ominous clues and early warnings. Mailin’s mother Monica, sister Michelle and childhood friend Kichi also share their testimonies via archive clips and contemporary interviews.

The boldest stylistic decision Esteve makes is couching what might have been a bleak, harrowing abuse story in visually rich language that is inventive, original, highly cinematic and often incongruously, disturbingly beautiful. Alternating between monochrome and colour, she interweaves factual background material with recurring imagery of spooky forests, dimly lit roads, and pulsing circular portals that come to resemble gateways into Hell. Much of these motifs are pure abstract act, and indeed the director has used similar symbols in her immersive artworks and short films. Even so, they prove very effective here, lending Mailin’s battle with her abuser the nightmarish, dread-filled texture of a non-fiction horror film. Which on one level, of course, it is.

Mailin is clearly not a conventional crime-case documentary. Esteve’s highly stylised approach lacks journalistic rigour, and sometimes becomes a little too diffuse and dreamy for its own good. Locations, timelines and character details remain fuzzy throughout. Events seem to loop and drift for much of the story’s mid-section, which in fairness may be an attempt to mirror the recurring, haunting nature of unresolved trauma. At times this collaborative art project feels like an act of catharsis for Mailin, film-making as therapy.

For viewers unfamiliar with Mailin’s court case, there are several dramatic twists and reversals during the film’s final act which lend extra emotional bite to her heroine’s ongoing quest for justice, or at least closure. But Esteve never makes her a powerless victim, more like a bruised but defiant survivor, seizing control of the chaotic narrative of her life.

Director, screenwriter, editing: María Silvia Esteve
Cinematography: María Silvia Esteve, Andrea Cabrera
Producers: María Silvia Esteve, Alejandra López, Cristina Hanes, Radu Stancu
Sound Design: María Silvia Esteve, Filip Muresan
Music: María Silvia Esteve, Ieronim Pogorilovschi, Codrin Lazar
Production companies: Hana Films (Argentina), Ikki Films (France), deFilm (Romania)
World sales: The Party Film Sales
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Spanish
89 minutes

The Six Billion Dollar Man is a masterwork and a near-masterpiece. The film goes back and forth across Assange’s life and is told in chapters, the meat, undoubtedly, being the events that followed the film’s subject after he jumped bail in the UK, entering the Ecuadorian embassy in London to seek asylum. That 2012 event added the South American country to a cross-national intrigue already involving the US, the UK, and Sweden. Jarecki’s chronicle of the life and times of the intrepid Australian is a massive monument to an unusually heroic stubbornness. It makes its Dutch debut at IDFA this week after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It won’t be the last place it shows up. Already, rights to the film have been scooped.

Jarecki pulls back the curtain to reveal the complex history that allowed Ecuador defy whatever pressures were applied by the US government, as it sought extradition. In his telling, the reason President Rafael Correa could do this lies in the complex history Ecuador has with the US. Jarecki’s job, in one sense, is to present what is a crazy story in modern politics into something that is watchable without sacrificing the facts. He excels on both fronts. To grasp the weight of the work the director set for himself, take a look at the length of the Assange Wikipedia page. All of that information — including new interviews with significant players in the story — are boiled down into a tale lasting just over 120 minutes. That he manages to make an entertaining package while at it is doubly impressive.

Assange is just as impressive and it is a minor disappointment that the film doesn’t attempt some psychoanalysis of the man. What are the experiential makings and inner workings of a man so obdurate he risks his freedom and the likely lethal ire of several powerful countries by publishing highly confidential documents? We’ll probably never know. What we do know is that for over a decade the man behind Wikileaks became some kind of bargaining chip. Among the many documents that add up to Jarecki’s account, one literalises that bargaining chip. And it will come as no surprise that the man involved in the literal bargain is President Trump, one of three US presidents who, over the course of their tenure, become invested in capturing the man who was then the world’s most notorious publisher.

A well-known deal-maker, Trump had his government arrange a pact with Ecuador that would involve the exchange of cash for the man holed up in their embassy in London. It is the monetary part of this deal that bestows the title of this film. This section of the story, unfortunately, also contains the documentary’s main problem. In a bid to make Trump into some of kind of evil everyman, screen time is spent adding images from the January 6 Capitol Attack into a narrative that, frankly, has absolutely no use for it. This needless passage in an otherwise clear-eyed project comes to feel like the product of what has been tagged Trump Derangement Syndrome.

This section can only be seen as a misjudgment because otherwise this is an excellent piece of work. The Six Billion Dollar Man deserves to be spoken about only in superlatives. If a great man deserves a great documentary, Jarecki has delivered exactly what is required.

Director: Eugene Jarecki
Producer: Kathleen Fournier
Co-producers: Andrew McLain, Molly Bareiss, Claudia Becker, José Passarelli, Juan
Passarelli
Executive producer: Mathilde Bonnefoy, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Addison Odea,
James Packer
Cinematography: Joe Fletcher, David McDowall, Jack Harrison, Derek Hallquist,
Juan Passarelli
Editing: Martin Reimers, David Fairhead, Simon Dopslaf, Zora Schiffer
Music: Niklas Paschburg, Akin Sevgör, Robert Miller, Belief Defect
Production companies: Charlotte Street Films (US)
World Sales: WME Independent
Venue: IDFA (Signed)
In English
129 minutes

That there is the chance this could happen — and in Belgium, an EU country with progressive ideals — points to one of the many problems of treating rape accusations within legal confines: there is the possibility that a putative victim gets treated more harshly than a perpetrator. Furthermore, rape, as everyone knows, is a curious crime in that the victim could emerge from the act and its litigation as diminished as the rapist, if not more. This imbalance appears to be a reason director Sien Versteyhe chooses a distinguishing feature in framing the story she tells in The Sessions. The film takes place almost entirely in a room with a female therapist, who uses EMDR and gets the victim talking about the experience. In almost every shot in the film, the viewer can see only the back of the victim. She is never named. She is never shown.

This reticence, this restraint, is mirrored in the life of the victim. Her family has no idea what happened. The only person who seems to know about the traumatic episode is a boyfriend, who is also not shown. Versteyhe is, of course, aware of the stigma of rape. In the credits she refers to her principal subject as “brave woman”. It’s a brave decision by the filmmaker — but this inevitably means that The Sessions is not quite expansive. Thus, this is a film that reproduces the intimacy of a dastardly act while excising the violence. You have to listen to what a traumatised young woman is saying about her experience, with nary a distraction. As women’s concerns are relevant in the present political climate, The Sessions, which has just world premiered at IDFA, will have no trouble booking festival appearances. Schools and other educational entities should also be interested.

There are, of course, two sides to a story, so it is plausible to ask what about the accused young man’s side of the tale. This proves unnecessary, though, because The Sessions is not an investigatory documentary looking to uproot the truth about who is right and who did wrong. What we know of him comes from her words and what we know of the ongoing legal process is heard over the phone. Apparently, the accused young man — a student as she is — says that while there was sex, it was consensual. But during the therapy session, the subject of consent comes up only because the subject herself brings it up during one of her sessions with the therapist. It hardly matters to the core of the film, which is, how does a woman, or how does this woman, process the experience of rape? Her language is mainly one of invasion. “I did not want him in me,” she says again and again at one point. Her feelings about being violated, especially by someone she trusted and loved in the past, are the point of Versteyhe’s film. And in taking away her face, her words may stand-in for any woman who has been in her shoes.

In essence, while Belgium’s legal apparatus — shown here as rather lackadaisical — is after a provable truth, Versteyhe’s film is after the emotional truth of the experience of rape. And by framing the film solely from the female victim’s point of view, she isn’t denying the accused a chance at a defence. She is obviating the need for that. There is no need to ascertain the veracity of the central incident, given the anonymity of the characters involved and the focus on experience. This, of course, isn’t a distinction likely to please potential detractors, but it is one that is abundantly obvious for viewers who come to The Sessions light, without carrying too much of a gender bias.

Director: Sien Versteyhe
Screenplay: Sien Versteyhe
Producer: Wouter Sap
Co-producer: Simon Vrebos
Cinematography: Sien Versteyhe
Editing: Dieter Diependaele
Sound Design: Thomas Vertongen
Music: Patricia Vanneste
Production companies: Lionheart Productions (Belgium), VRT (Belgium)
Venue: IDFA (Luminous)
In Dutch
71 minutes

Shot in sporadic bursts over five years, Better Go Mad in the Wild delivers a richly layered portrait of Frantisek and Ondrej Klisik, two balding, bearded, hermits who share a crumbling farmhouse in Sumava, a mountainous region close to the Czech-German border. Both are around 60, though they look much older, partly due to lives marked by hardship, poverty and boozy excess. Frantisek is also missing an arm following a sawmill accident. Ondrej drinks and smokes, howls at the moon, and sings heartbreak ballads to a captive audience of chickens. Between reminiscing about lost love, youthful folly and the women whose hearts they once broke, the brothers fight, fall out and reconcile on a daily basis.

Despite his disability, Frantisek is the more optimistic dreamer of the two, working on ambitious side projects, including the construction of a “perpetuum mobile” flying machine. “I’m an artist and I want to say something important to the world,” he insists. Ondrej is a more fatalistic, railing against “boring cunts” Putin and Hitler, and routinely dismissing life as futile. When his brother berates him over his drunken binges, it only leads to more arguments and even physical fights. “Every time to tell me to quit, I want to drink more,” he growls. Later, in more conciliatory mood, he says “sorry that I will die first… bring a flower to my grave.”

Though this is ostensibly a non-fiction film, Remo fills Better Go Mad in the Wild with semi-staged vignettes and striking visual tableaux: a burning snowman, a symbolic dividing wall between the brothers, a giant circular mirror that becomes a recurring motif. But the director’s most whimsical stylistic device is putting snippets of voice-over narration into the mouth of the duo’s pet bull, Nandy. This is an audacious twist but it works, reinforcing the sense that the brothers inhabit their own phantasmagorical realm slightly unmoored from conventional reality. We are definitely not in Kansas any more, Toto.

Couching this story in poetry and music, including ironically triumphant passages from the symphonic piece “Vltava” by local Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, Remo frames his protagonists more like semi-mythical outsider artists than bickering backwoods misfits. Stronger on visual brio than explanatory hinterland, Better Go Mad in the Wild skips between years and seasons with few clear markers, giving us almost zero background detail on the brothers. At one point it emerges that both were decorated for their resistance to Czechoslovakia’s former Communist regime, a fleeting mention that demands much more context. An unexpected death, announced late in the film, brings a poignant sense of closure but again feels under-explained. However, for all its minor omissions and oversights, this is still a boldly original, emotionally charged, and life-affirming experiment in stranger-than-fiction documentary cinema.

Director, producer: Miro Remo
Screenwriters: Miro Remo, Aleš Palán, based on the book by Palán
Cinematography: Dušan Husár, Miro Remo
Editing: Šimon Hájek, Maté Csuport
Music: Adam Matej
Production company: Arsy-Versy (Czech)
World sales: Filmotor, Prague
Venue: IDFA (Best of Fests)
83 minutes
In Czech, Slovak

This protagonist is a fictional being, crafted by filmmaker Firat Yucel and represented on screen in the form of a desktop diary. Their story is told through a selection of non-fiction footage combined with an ongoing text journal that mines a prevalent contemporary concern. This is the plight of the perpetually online individual, appalled by the injustices of the world and how readily they are available 24/7 at their fingertips, so mired in the doomscrolling and overawed by the torrent that they are paralysed by the constant emotional toil.

Such subject matter is not new territory for the purveyors of desktop cinema, this mode is one in which the screen replicates or directly shows the desktop of the filmmaker or an unseen user and we experience their use of the technology via which we see various videos and web searches. There is typically a clear – and at the least, underlying – engagement with how we consume information and media in the modern world inherent in such films. In Yucel’s case what he excels at is conveying the psychological impact of these experiences.

Videos pass by like flickers, juxtaposing amateur recordings of killings and bombings with produced media. All the while, the protagonist wrestles with the advice their being given about how to sleep better – like their living in a world in which the external anxieties brought on by social media accounts of genocide pales into insignificance compared to the blue light of a smartphone screen. It manages to be both humorous and damning, a poignant look at overpowering nature of consuming injustice through social media and the exhausting toll it can take with a little smidgen of hope at the potential power of real world activism in combating the malaise.

Director, editing, cinematography: Firat Yucel
Screenplay: Firat Yucel, Aylin Kuryel
Sound: Metin Bozkurt
Production company: Image Acts (Turkey)
Venue: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Best of Fests)
In English, Turkish, Dutch, Serbian Arabic
18 minutes

Read more of our short film coverage over at Verdict Shorts

Bakhshi explains his methods in an opening voice-over message to his nieces Mahya and Zahra, who are now university students on the cusp of turning 20. He explains how he has used camera zooms, edits and studio tweaks to mask any glimpses of adult female hair or bare flesh, the same coy techniques routinely deployed by Iranian state TV. As these two young women review a montage of their lives so far, the director also offers them space to pause the video, comment and interpret. Rich in potential, this is a clever stylistic gimmick that other documentary makers should adopt. That said, the sisters prove far too politely respectful to critique their uncle’s work, which slightly undermines his inspired notion of turning the film into a lively dialogue between director and subjects.

The first half of All My Sisters is mostly a tender, funny celebration of childhood innocence: Mahya and Zahra eat cakes, play with dolls, dance and sing and ask goofy questions, just like kids all over the world. But as puberty approaches, the religious strictures of wider Iranian society begin to limit their lives. Bakhshi films the girls trying on headscarves and full-body chadors for the first time, aged eight or nine. Long before adolescence, they learn to cover their “sinful” hair and hide their bodies. At school, they sing patriotic sons and celebrate the grisly fate of ancient Islamic martyrs.

Internal family tensions also play a role. Heard off screen but never seen, a conservative grandmother gives increasingly prominent moral instruction the sisters, warning them against listening to pop music. “Your father wants to send you to hell,” she cautions. “A reader of the Quran doesn’t do such things.” Even as pre-teens, the girls demonstrate an astute grasp of theological ethics: “Granny wants God to love her,” Zahra frowns, “but God loves everyone.”

Fatefully, the women hit their teens in 2022, just as the deeply suspicious death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Iranian police custody triggers a wave of national protests and worldwide outrage. Mahya and Zahra, now joined by their new little sister Maleka, bravely lend their voices to the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, penning protest songs and shouting angry solidarity slogans from the rooftops. When their mother, also unnamed and unseen, tells them to abandon their futile rebellion and focus on personal goals, Mahya tells her “privileged people owe their comfort to those who struggled.” The Iranian regime inevitably cracks down on the protests, killing at least 500 people and detaining over 20,000.

For a documentary rooted in such spiky current issues, All My Sisters feels a little underpowered in places. The meta-textual framing device is a great idea, serving almost as a allegory for how self-conscious and guarded women must be in a deeply patriarchal society, but it is underused for much of the film. More directly interactive input from Mahya and Zahra themselves would could have bolstered a story which is, at its heart, about a rising generation of outspoken women and girls who hope to reshape the wider sociopolitical narrative in Iran.

Thankfully, this stop-start device figures more prominently in the film’s later stages, which includes more self-aware commentary from the sisters. In a lyrical final sequence, which follows the girls as they visit the mountains overlooking Tehran, Bakhshi adds digital fog effects in case the footage ever screens in public and “unknown men” view their uncovered hair. This is a smart use of technology to make a wider political point, both absurdly funny and achingly poignant.

In 2025, the murderous Iranian regime remains firmly entrenched, and still executes more women than any other nation. Even so, All My Sisters ends on a cautiously optimistic note, with Bakhshi noting how wearing the hijab is no longer widely enforced, partly thanks to defiant young women like Mahya and Zahra. They are the real future of Iran. Hopefully a sequel film about their lives, 10 or 15 years from now, will provide a more decisive happy ending.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography, sound: Massoud Bakhshi
Editing: Hayedeh Safiyari, Jacques Comets
Producers: Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu, Bady Minck, Eric Lagesse, Mohammad Farokhmanesh, Massoud Bakhshi
Production companies: Amour Fou (Austria), Sampek (France), Brave New Work (Germany), Bon Gah (Iran)
World sales: Pyramide, France
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
78 minutes
In Farsi

The child of Chilean political exiles raised in the Netherlands, Fernandez has been an IDFA insider for more than 20 years. She takes over the top job after a long period heading the festival’s Bertha Fund, which supports documentary film-makers from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania. Is her new role a significant change?

“Yes, of course,” she tells The Film Verdict. “The Bertha Fund was a is a specific domain with one specific goal and mission. So in that sense, it is more simple than what I’m doing now. I mean, the festival comprises so many different elements. There are so many interests at stake that we need to balance without losing sight of what we think is important. The politics, the funding is much bigger. All these things obviously make it very different.”

Even before her official debut this week, the politics of IDFA have already become headline news for Fernandez. She takes over as Artistic Director from Orwa Nyrabia, who was criticised for appearing to endorse a controversial pro-Palestinian protest in 2023. Now IDFA has raised the stakes by becoming the first major festival to officially deny accreditation to films and industry guests with ties to Israeli government bodies.

IDFA bosses recently made this decision transparent in its newly drafted Principles and Guidelines, drawn up in partnership with the Paris-based NGO Reporters Without Borders, which rates countries according to press freedom, editorial independence and danger to journalists. Currently ranked 112 in the 2025 Index, lower than Haiti and Zimbabwe, Israel is in the group’s “very serious” category following the killing of at least 200 reporters in Gaza by the Israeli military.

“We’ve always been dealing with film-makers risking their lives, working under pressure, working under repression,” Fernandez says. “At the same time, it has also been been a case that from these same countries where these film-makers are, despite all this, trying to make their films, we have official government organisations or official delegations also trying to attend the festival, because culture and film is also seen as a promotional tool. This is something that we’ve had to balance and deal with for many years. And what we decided to do this year was to be more transparent about that. That is why we wrote these these principles and guidelines. So where freedom of expression is under serious threat, we don’t accredit organisations that have funding from the government.”

Any partisan statement touching on Israel and Palestine is likely to be inflammatory in the current climate, of course, but so far the backlash to IDFA’s decision has been relatively minor. Ukrainian director Alexander Rodnyansky withdrew his film Notes of a True Criminal from the program, calling the ban “duplicitous” and “hypocritical”. But Fernandez is careful to stress this is not a blanket boycott, more of a carefully balanced case-by-case policy.

“We’re not restricting by nationality,” she explains. “Last year, for example, we had two Israeli films that had funds from the Israeli state, but we selected those films because we felt there was a place for them at IDFA. So it’s not a rigid thing. And I think what has caused a lot of misinterpretation or confusion is the fact that it’s a nuanced approach. It’s not black and white. People don’t like that.”

With more than 250 films screening across four major competition strands, Fernandez is wary of playing favourites from the 2025 IDFA program. But she shares a handful of personal highlights. One is Past Future Continuous by Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani, about the homesick yearning of an exiled Iranian woman living in the US. “This is very personal to me,” Fernandez nods. “They really managed to grasp what it is when you are exiled and when you live far away from your family. And it’s a feeling that they were able to express in images.”

Another recommendation is Trillion, the latest meditative visual poem by Russian director Victor Kossakovsky, who previously made Gunda (2020) and Architecton (2024). As on Gunda, Hollywood start Joaquin Phoenix is once again serving as executive producer. “Probably there are people who are going to be totally mesmerised, and there are people that are not going to like this,” Fernandez says. “But he’s an artist, and it’s a very special film.”

Fernandez also highlights  Silent Flood by Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, a immersive portrait of a pacifist religious community living in the shadow of Russian invasion. “Yes, Ukraine is at war, and there’s war in this film,” she says. “But this film is about so much more. It really focuses on this religious community that live on the side of what is happening in the country.”

In recent years, IDFA has also been at the forefront of debates about the use of AI in film-making. The 2024 program even opened with a partly AI-scripted docudrama, Piotr Winiewicz’s audacious About a Hero. This year the festival is hosting an industry talk entitled Documentary, AI and Ownership of the Image, while the international competition section includes the world premiere of Synthetic Sincerity by Marc Isaacs, a playful hybrid documentary about the quest to create AI performers on screen. In contrast to many industry doom-sayers, Fernandez has mixed feelings about the impact this fast-evolving new technology will have on cinema.

“I’ve been to several other festivals in the last year, panels talking about this, which are mostly scary,” she laughs. “At the same time, I also know from conversations with producers and film-makers that AI as a tool within their vision of storytelling is helpful. Like, in working through archives, or creating certain things that they could not shoot. So of course, there is a huge danger, but that danger has to do also with the world in which we live, where it’s about fake news, what is real, what is not real. But I also think there’s an option to look at AI as one other tool that can enhance and can support a film-maker in crafting his creative vision. In the end, it’s about ethics.”