FIFDH 2025

The StoryBoard Impact Award, valued at CHF10,000 (approx €10,500) was given to Children of Honey by Igar Ganatra and Immanuel Musa Marco. The Swiss Focus Award (CHF 2,500, approx. €2,600) went to the project Nathalie by Tamara Milosevic. The Sublimages Impact Award, offered by Sublimages and comprising a translation and subtitle creation into one of four languages, was won by the Ukrainian team of directors Alisa Kovalenko/Marysia Nikitiuk and producers Natalia Libet/Olha Beskhmelnytsina for their project Traces.

The Chicken & Egg Films boss addressed the filmmakers, funders, advocates and changemakers gathered in Geneva, to explain how she came to understand the power of storytelling to effect fundamental change, and how Chicken & Egg champions this principle. “Films are just one piece of the larger fight for justice, but they are uniquely well suited to moving the needle on urgent and complex issues, because they touch our emotions in deep, visceral ways - emotions that reports, white papers, news stories, and other forms of media rarely access,” she said. Report follows...

“We are Hadzabe and we want the world to know who we are.” Children of Honey follows three young Hadza friends—Nd!uba, Nguilabe, and Embilibi—at a critical crossroads of their once-peaceful hunter-gatherer community. With 90% of their ancestral land lost and modern pressures mounting, they must decide whether to hold onto their ancient traditions or be pulled into modernity. Impact producer Simona Nickmanova outlines her strategy to BDE.

The director/protagonist of The Myth of Monsters made an impassioned pitch at the Impact Days March 11. In the project, Beatrice is a late-diagnosed autistic woman, approaching her 40th birthday—a milestone she never thought she’d reach, given that her life has been marked by misdiagnoses, wrongful psychiatric institutionalisation and trauma. “I've spent my whole life trying to fit into a world not built with me in mind, and labelling women like me as difficult, angry, as a monster,” Leong told the Geneva audience.

The feature doc concerns the agency formed in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to prevent starvation and distress among Palestinian refugees. But UNWRA has been heavily attacked in recent months over its alleged links to Palestinian militant groups. “It is obvious that among all the [30,000] UNWRA employees, some of them are connected or belonging or in touch with Hamas,” director Wadimoff tells BDE. “The problem is not this. The problem is the fact that UNWRA is doing the job that nobody else wants to do.”

Produced by Esther van Messel of First Hand Films and fellow Swiss outfit Spirited Heroine, Kalari (90/52’) tells of the eponymous Indian martial art that is taking on greater significance for women within a society where gender-based violence is commonplace. “Kalari is a film about new heroines in a country where violence against women is both historically ingrained and a daily reality,” First Hand Films’ Daniel Schneider tells BDE.

In Alisa Kovalenko’s new project, co-directed with fellow Ukrainian Marysia Nikitiuk, six women share their traumatic experience of sexual violence and torture during Russian aggression in Ukraine between 2014-23. “Showing these genocidal crimes of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine committed by Russian soldiers, and its systematic use as a weapon of war in brutal violation of international law, will be an effective reminder of a great danger to the civilised world,” says producer Natalia Libet.

“Does Europe have to get dirty before getting green?” That’s the key question asked in Scars Of Growth, the new feature doc from Linda Osusky and Monika Grassl. One of the subjects the film explores is the green mining of the raw material needed for new technologies. “Mentally, I think that it is an old generation that is guiding and directing the policies…we want to show that it is the wrong way. You cannot mine yourself out of the climate crisis…you cannot destroy nature to save nature,” says co-director Linda Osusky tells BDE.

Welcome to the very unusual rural retreat where queer youngsters can spend time attending workshops, having fun and addressing any anxieties they may feel about school, family or identity. “When I saw the field full of parents dropping off their kids, I immediately had to cry,” Dutch co-director van der Rhee describes his feelings when he first encountered the camp. “A field full of queer young people who are accepted by their parents - that affected me so super deeply.”

When she began work on The Tender Revolution (screening in Competition - Focus at FIFDH Geneva), German director Annelie Boros was “looking for people who put care at the centre of all they are doing - caregivers or also care-takers.” She adds to BDE: “I feel there is this connection between taking care of humans but also everything which is alive - and this is something not really talked about in the care debate most of the time.”