IDFA 25

Six years ago, Susana de Sousa Dias (IDFA’s Guest of Honour in 2025) first started research into the so-called “ghost town” left behind when Henry Ford’s rubber factory in the Brazilian Amazon closed down in the early 20th Century. Fordlândia Panacea is her second film on the subject. There is a familiar narrative about Fordlândia, as the haunted utopia that Henry Ford left behind. De Sousa Dias believes this is a crudely reductive vision of a place that has a far more complex history. “It was neither a Utopian project, and nor is it a ghost town,” the director insists to BDE.

In Sien Versteyhe’s new documentary we watch a therapy session within a care centre for survivors of sexual violence. The woman in the film may be traumatised and vulnerable but she is tough, the director underlines. “We are talking more and more about sexual violence, but that we are talking about it in the wrong way,” she tells BDE. “I still feel that. In the stories we see or hear, the perpetrator is almost always the man in the bushes, the monster, and the survivor is always weak. We’re not getting any further than the image of a weak victim in a shower…that’s not the reality.”

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.

The rise of Elon Musk’s ground-breaking electric car operation Tesla serves as a fascinating backdrop for Andreas Pichler’s jarring and revealing feature documentary, as a fatal accident in Florida triggers a protracted lawsuit to hold the company accountable, bringing into serious doubt the company’s much-hyped “autopilot” function.

In her new feature doc, which world-premieres in Amsterdam, Lynne Sachs sets out to discover why, over the years, receiving business cards from strangers has left such a strong imprint on her consciousness. For her the process was like the tale of Hansel and Gretel. “You leave the crumbs…and they lead you back somewhere…The whole project was to figure out how we are affected by those intersections of our lives with other people's.”

In Benjamin Bucher’s debut feature, Joyce, a 22-year-old African-Chinese dancer, tries to find her way in Europe – torn between artistic and identity-related self-discovery, and financial dependence on her mother’s TikTok business. “The film deals with universal themes that many of us can relate to, such as the search for independence, migration and globalisation, identity and the attempt to preserve real moments in an increasingly staged world,” producer Olivier Zobrist tells BDE.

There’s a gentle prodding of issues surrounding AI in this documentary-fiction hybrid by Marc Isaacs, in which a research lab requests access to his documentaries to help train their AI to display more ‘sincerity’. The resulting film is highly entertaining with its interplay between the real and the artificial but, intellectually, it does not delve so deeply. What ‘sincerity’ is or could be – or could be defined as for AI purposes – is never seriously discussed.

Filmmakers Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel spent seven years making their new feature documentary, an intimate epic set almost entirely within the confines of the ex-Kartli sanatorium in Tbilisi, Georgia, which became home to 200 displaced families. “We had this feeling of the building as a personality with its own character and mood,” Kalandadze says. “The key to understand how these people live, and what they do all day was also to study the building itself, all the stairs and balconies.”

The Whickers announced November 16 that it is increasing its Film & TV Funding Award from £100,000 to £120,000, and its runner-up development award from £20,000 to £25,000. The announcement was made at IDFA during the launch of the organisation’s annual Cost of Docs survey for which filmmakers are invited to share the true cost of documentary production. The deadline for applications for The Whickers Film and TV Fund is January 30, while the deadline to submit responses to the survey is December 16.

The acclaimed Portuguese documentary filmmaker is announced as the Guest of Honour at the 38th IDFA, which will take place from November 13 to 23. The festival also announced September 9 the second instalment of its curated program Dead Angle, which focuses this year on 'Institutions'. IDFA further underlined the 'Off the Internet' theme of this year's IDFA DocLab, the festival’s new media section.