IDFA 25

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.

With Getting the Message, Neasa Ní Chianáin steps inside the heart of political power at a moment when public trust in institutions is eroding and the climate emergency is accelerating. Over 18 months, Ní Chianáin gained unprecedented “fly-on-the-wall” access to Ireland’s Green Party leader and Minister for the Environment, Eamon Ryan, capturing both the mechanisms of democracy and the private moments that reveal the human cost of political life. The project is one of the Rough Cut presentations of this year's IDFA Forum, and will be presented November 16.

In his new feature documentary, Danish docmaker Michael Madsen seeks to explore, together with visionary architect Daniel Libeskind, “the edge of human creativity” through the completion and recording of six architectural challenges over six days. “On the one hand, Architecture as Invention will aim to be a creative playground; and on the other, it will aim to be a portrait of this century as envisioned by Mr. Libeskind: the chaos, the wars, the destruction, the Holocaust; but also, the love, the memories and the dreams,” producer Per Damgaard Hansen tells Business Doc Europe.

France-based filmmaker Nolwenn Hervé arrives at IDFA Forum 2025 with The Cord, a rough-cut project produced by Estelle Robin You for Grande Ourse Films. The documentary follows Carolina, a fearless activist operating in the crumbling health system of Maracaibo, Venezuela—an environment where, as the director notes, “life hangs by a thread,” and where women are forced to fight daily for their own survival and that of their babies.

Iranian helmer Marjan Khosravi brings Dreams of the Wild Oaks to IDFA Forum 2025 as a rough-cut project, now in post-production and produced by Milad Khosravi for Seven Springs Pictures, with French and Spanish co-production partners on board in the form of Avant la Nuit and Lukimedia. Set within a Bakhtiari community in southwest Iran, the film follows Samaneh, a young girl racing against time to save her freedom. Caught between a forced marriage and the ancestral ritual of Cease Blood Sacrifice, she embarks on a quest to find rare and endangered birds—a path that challenges her beliefs and tests the limits of her father’s love.

Docmaker Mary Stephen’s Palimpsest: The Story of a Name draws on family secrets and outstanding archive footage to pose the universal question, what’s in a name? As the late Eric Rohmer’s editor, Stephen is a cutter of high renown, a fact that informs her debut feature doc. “The real structure of the story really comes out when I'm editing, so that confirms that editing is my calling,” she tells BDE. “That really is the guiding approach to this film. I kept saying to people that [the story] will come when I'm editing it. Try and convince an unknown funder with that! Luckily, we had ARTE come on board very early.”

The prolific Dutch filmmaker is back at IDFA, this time with a film that tackles the difficult topic of psychosis. Several of Bouwmann's protagonists mentioned that, during their psychotic periods, they felt “as if they were in a movie.” Some of their insights are also subversive, suggesting that, at such moments, they’re also experiencing life in a heightened fashion, and that going back to “ordinary reality” seems monotonous and anticlimactic by comparison. “Euphoria and deep insights can be part of psychosis,” he says.

In his new documentary, Spanish filmmaker Miguel Eek not only investigates what motivated revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) to liberate Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from the Portuguese yoke, he also reveals the man behind the myth. “This was a man who could be involved in high profile diplomatic discussions at the United Nations and, at the same time, he was writing a letter to his wife about the beauty of the camels in the desert,” Eek tells Business Doc Europe.

Dutch visual artist Jeroen Kooijmans discusses his debut feature doc which is both therapeutic and loving, and dedicated to fellow artist Elspeth Diederix, the 30-year+ love of his life, and the muse behind the film. “In the first three and a half years when I was starting this project, basically I wanted to make a portrait of her. I wanted to make a love letter for her as a surprise. I also didn't want to tell her because I was afraid she wouldn't like it, and would censor a lot of footage,” Kooijmans confides.

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.”