FIFDH 2025

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.

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.

Core to the Geneva-based industry programme is the pitch of 12 international film projects developed during the Impact Lab training programme, and 4 further impact projects in Swiss Focus 2025. Designed for filmmakers, NGOs & international organisations, philanthropists, impact practitioners and distributors, and offering case studies, networking events and examples of best practices from around the world, FIFDH Impact Days will run 9-11 March 2025.

“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.

From 7th to 16th March, the 23rd edition of the FIFDH calls for a re-examination of “our political systems and to forge community in the face of the rise of far-right movements as well as the threat they pose to fundamental rights.” Guests of the festival include Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, activist Paul Watson, author Douglas Kennedy, journalist Salomé Saqué, surgeon Ghassan Abu Sittah and actress Ángela Molina (Cosmos, by Germinal Roaux).

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...

There can be something very grim and unseemly about the use of the “veto” at the UN. The five permanent members of the Security Council (France, the UK, China, Russia and the US) can block any resolution that comes before them. Sometimes, when they do so, war crimes and genocide may follow. “I have enormous respect for the diplomats at the United Nations because they are doing a very difficult thing. Unfortunately, the UN has an Achilles’ heel [the veto] built in at the very beginning,” director Tim Slade tells BDE.

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.

Impact Days has a stated mission to channel the power of documentary film as a tool for concrete social and policy change, underlines section head Ana Castañosa to Business Doc Europe as doors open on the event’s seventh roll-out in Geneva. Core to the event is the pitch of 12 Impact campaigns for 12 new docs - some completed, others yet to premiere. “We believe these films have the power to help motivate structural and behavioural change,” Castañosa underlines of the pitches.

In Front of Us paints a deeply moving portrait of two women’s fight for accountability in a conflict the world has chosen to ignore, revealing both the strength and limits of international law. That war is between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been raging since 2020. “While the film highlights Armenian cases, its broader message is clear: Accountability for war crimes is a global imperative that transcends borders and politics,” Armenian producer Mariam Davtyan (Bars Media) tells BDE.