Nick Cunningham

It is one of the most famous photos in history. In 1968, two days after the Tet Offensive, the South Vietnamese General Loan was photographed executing Captain Lēm of the invading Vietcong with a single shot to the head. “For the Vietnamese, it was really the definition of the civil war. It was a Vietnamese brother shooting another Vietnamese brother,” director Naja Pham Lockwood underlines to BDE of her short documentary On Healing Land, Birds Perch. “I wanted to tell the stories behind that photo.”

It may be a fiction film, but it is the first by a director acclaimed for her documentary output. What’s more, Kat Steppe’s Sunday Ninth, a story about Alzheimer’s and the vulnerability of memory, is set in a real operational care home. “This approach allows fiction to take a step further. Blending real people into the fictional storyline highlights the real-life story, and vice versa. This mix creates a powerful viewing experience that deeply connects with the audience,” the Flemish director underlines.

Christopher Radcliff’s short film We Were the Scenery is both tiny and epic in scale, as it tells the story of two Vietnamese war refugees, the parents of the film’s producer and writer Cathy Linh Che, who, after escaping to The Philippines, were drafted as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “Their VHS copy of the film sits on the shelf next to all their home video tapes,” says the director of Che’s parents now. “It's something that they use as a sort of tool for reminiscing in the same way that they do their home videos.”

Told in five distinct acts that span the period between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, the Czech Republic's candidate for an Oscar in the International Feature Film category, chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation undertaken by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her story is told using approximately 3000 still photographs and the diaries she kept from those years.

US-based Hong Kong director Elizabeth Lo and editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen discuss Mistress Dispeller with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Shaunak Sen (All That Breathes, 2022). “There is something that this doc gets at that usually documentary films aren't able to access,” says Sen during their chat. “This is arguably one of the first films I've ever seen which is able to get into the innards and entrails of that subterranean world [of the characters] - which I think is marvellous.”

Petra Costa’s documentary investigates the toxic link between evangelical Christianity and political governance within her home country of Brazil, most notably under the regime of Jair Bolsonaro. The Netflix doc presents the former-president as almost puppet-like in his devotion to the firebrand tele-evangelist Silas Malafaia. “We knew they had an intimate political relationship, but as we watched the material, it became so evident the kind of subservience and reverence that Bolsonaro had for Malafaia,” says Costa, who is joined in interview by producer Alessandra Orofino.

Dutch interactive doyenne Corine Meijers enjoyed a very busy IDFA DocLab that saw two of her productions in Competition, and a third which was up for grabs during Forum. Meijers is an avowed fan of co-pro, she tells BDE. “I don't know how to do it otherwise. It is nice that we have basic funding in the Netherlands for immersive projects. But the kind of projects I make, with the basic funding that there is, it’s quite hard to do it at that level, so I have to reach out.”

Roger Ross Williams (Stamped From The Beginning) speaks to Geeta Gandbhir about her Sundance-winning feature doc The Perfect Neighbor, which presents a devastating critique of race, inequality and the vigilante-style ‘stand your ground’ legislation in operation in the US today, and which details the events leading up to the murder of Gandbhir’s friend Ajike Owens. The director recalled the conversation she had with Ajike’s mother Pam in terms of the outreach support she could offer after the tragic loss. “I have no money to give you. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a lawyer…but I think I can make a film.”

Business Doc Europe caught up with EURODOC’s Nora Philippe before an IDFA 2025 closing ceremony that awarded three films that were developed at the leading producer training lab. In total, no fewer than 37 former EURODOC alumni were selected for IDFA 2025, including nine within International and Envision competitions. “EURODOC helps good projects become excellent, highly creative projects that definitely deserve such prestigious selections,” Philippe told BDE.

A Fox Under a Pink Moon picked up the Best Film in International Competition while Past Future Continuous won Best Film in the Envision Competition. The IDFA Award for Best Directing (worth €5,000) in International Competition went to Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel for The Kartli Kingdom while The IDFA Award for Best First Feature went to Paikar by Dawood Hilmandi. The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film was won by Maasja Ooms for My Word Against Mine.