Nick Cunningham

FIFDH Impact Days 2025 kicks off January 16 with the festival’s annual webinar on Impact Filmmaking for Social Justice. The event will explore the power and the challenges of promoting hopeful human rights narratives in documentaries and impact campaigns, via a case study of Mayye Zayed’s Lift Like a Girl and a panel discussion on “communicating hope in human rights.” The FIFDH Human Rights FF runs March 7-16 2025 in Geneva.

Organisers of Sundance FF (Jan 23 – Feb 2) announced December 11 the 93 feature and episodic programme titles that will make up its 2025 programme. These include 10 films in World Cinema Doc Comp, ten films in US Documentary Comp, and a further 11 documentary titles in Premieres. “The Sundance Film Festival remains steadfast in its commitment to elevating unique and urgent voices in independent storytelling,” commented Robert Redford, Sundance Institute Founder and President.

Running 12-16 May 2025, DocsBarcelona Industry is one of the core professional meeting points for the non-fiction sector in Europe, and will award prizes valued at 15,000 euros. The deadline for project submission is January 27, 2025, with an early bird deadline of December 31. DocsBarcelona will celebrate its 28th edition from May 8-18 2025.

In the UK 75% of disabled children have no access to school sport, points out Lily Ahree Siegel in her the award-winning short Equal Play. It isn’t the fault of the kids, nor their parents or their teachers. Rather it is a systemic problem which can and must be addressed via root and branch change. It is also a film with obvious international resonance, stresses producer Robert Ford. “It's an issue around the world - in most places it's probably even worse than the UK," Ford tells BDE.

The facts are stark. Four per cent of U.S. nursing staff are of Filipino heritage, yet during the pandemic, they accounted for nearly a third of deaths (31.5%) within the nursing community. At the same time, they had to contend with a resurgence of anti-Asian hate on the streets. In her award-winning documentary feature, Michele Josue sheds light on the little-known history of Filipino nurses in the U.S. and their pivotal role on the medical frontline during the COVID-19 crisis. Josue talks to BDE.

Egyptian journalist and filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at discusses his multi award-winning feature debut Hollywoodgate with Danish Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont (A House Made of Splinters, 2022). With unprecedented access to one of the most secretive cabals in the world - the Taliban - the film begins on the day after the last US soldier left Afghanistan in 2021 and follows a group of Taliban leaders in their first year back in power.

As doors closed on the festival's 49th roll-out, The Cats of Gokogu Shrine by Japanese director Kazuhiro Soda was handed the “Laceno d’Oro 49” Award. Portuguese filmmaker Frederico Lobo received the “Gli occhi sulla città” Award for Quando a Terra Foge, while Si dice di me by Isabella Mari picked up the “Laceno d’Oro Spazio Campania ‘Chiara Rigione’ Award.” All awards...

Recent winner of the Best Short Documentary prize at the 2024 IDA Awards, the New York Times Op-Docs film Instruments of a Beating Heart serves up a tear-jerking bundle of joy as a classful of Japanese children at elementary school compete to perform Ode to Joy to the new intake of first graders. “My six years in Japanese elementary school made me who I am - and that's why I wanted to make this film,” director Ema Ryan Yamazaki tells BDE.

Carla Gutierrez’s debut feature Frida, which won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award at Sundance 2024, concerns the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and looks to be a strong contender as awards season approaches. “We wanted to make a film about a woman who made the choice not to contain her own voice,” says Gutierrez of her subject who, she argues, came to global prominence only with the emergence of feminism in the 1970s and the movement's recognition of the ‘personal as political.’

Hot on the heels of its IDA Awards success, No Other Land (Palestine/Norway/US) by Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra & Hamdan Ballal, was named winner in the European Documentary category of the 37th European Film Awards. The European Young Audience Award went to The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Norway) by Benjamin Ree, produced by Ingvil Giske.