Festival program

Portuguese filmmaker, curator, and academic Susana de Sousa Dias was IDFA 2025’s Guest of Honor. Known for her singular approach to archival images and cinematic form, de Sousa Dias has built an internationally acclaimed body of work that interrogates dictatorship, colonial legacies, and the fragile terrain of memory. De Sousa Dias gave a Guest of Honor Talk in the Royal Theater Tuschinski. With the Retrospective program, IDFA presented a comprehensive look at de Sousa Dias’s uncompromising approach to creating dissident counter-archives and her distinctive visual style. These themes were extended to her Top 10 program, which presented an exploration into collective memory and filmmakers rewriting their political narratives.

Dead Angle is IDFA’s multi-year focus program that looks at the systemic structures that shape our lives—using documentary cinema to reveal what remains outside our direct field of vision. In 2025, the program focused on institutions, inviting a close examination of how they operate, where they falter, and their role moving forward. Documentary film offers a lens to trace their histories and contradictions—and to reflect on their role in shaping society and the civic structures we collectively sustain today.

IDFA DocLab is an interdisciplinary platform for interactive and immersive art, showcasing a diverse program of installations, games, VR, and live performances. The program offers both audiences and professionals the chance to engage with the intersection of documentary, art, new media, and emerging technologies.

The 19th edition of IDFA DocLab presented the theme Off the Internet, exploring the paradox of our time: a world perpetually connected through technology, at risk of disconnection by the same tools. The program grappled with the growing desire to disconnect, the impossibility of ever truly logging off, and the inherent privilege of stepping offline. With Off the Internet, DocLab turns to interactive and immersive art in search of new forms of presence and connection.

DocLab Exhibition

This year’s DocLab exhibition took place in Vlaamse Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond. The nine-day exhibition brought a broad selection of VR experiences, installations, games, and web documentaries together. The pay-what-you-want pricing model kept the threshold low, while the program remained strong in terms of content. Free guided tours were held daily for students and other interested parties. During these tours, visitors received a clear overview of the exhibition and were introduced to its development process, the underlying ideas, and the central themes.

VR Experiences

The selection of seven different virtual reality experiences in the DocLab program demonstrated the maturity and versatility of VR as a medium: diverse projects that broaden your perspective, long after you've taken off your headset. The experiences were presented in impressively designed installations as well as in the tried-and-true VR gallery stands, where audiences could reserve time slots in advance, offering an uninterrupted viewing experience.

Playrooms

What happens when we stop taking reality at face value? What's it like when games and web documentaries turn into a shared experience—by playing together, on the big screen? After last year's success, DocLab organized three Playrooms to provide space for experimentation and prototyping: open afternoons, each with its own unique format. They serve as meeting places for audiences and professionals to test "works in progress" and gain insight into the creative process of interactive and immersive experiences. In the DocLab Playrooms Connected Offline, I Feel Zine, and Hacking Reality, audiences could create their own zine, experience an AI-powered encounter with their opposite selves, and discover new ways to experience documentary games and digital art together.

DocLab at the Planetarium

This year, DocLab continued its collaboration with ARTIS Planetarium with two evening programs featuring various full-dome films and experiences. Planetariums invite us to gaze at the stars, but on these evenings, we turned our gaze to Earth and explored how countless worlds intersect and diverge on the Earth we share. This edition of DocLab at the Planetarium was created in collaboration with Diversion Cinema.

Other activities

In addition to a festival program for audiences, DocLab also scheduled activities for professionals in @droog. These included, for the eighth consecutive year, the the international DocLab Research & Development Program, in collaboration with partners such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This program offers space for artistic research and the development of new frameworks for interactive and interdisciplinary nonfiction. This is the substantive engine that generates knowledge and methods that guide the broader DocLab program.

Ahead of the festival, the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant 2025 awarded its winners. The Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant supports projects in a crucial phase of their development. This annual grant, provided by the Netherlands Film Fund, is intended to help Dutch-based creators realize their work and premiere it on an international platform during IDFA. This year, four projects were realized with this support, ranging from a hallucinatory full-dome experience to intimate, handwritten letters about our digital existence. All four projects had their world premiere during IDFA DocLab 2025.

IDFA’s great added value compared to regular cinema screenings is the context the festival provides for films and projects—by means of conversations with filmmakers and audiences, reflections by experts, additional events, and carefully curated editorial publications.

During the festival, the Film Talks and Filmmaker Talks cater to both audiences and professionals. Film critic Dana Linssen sat down with editor and filmmaker Mary Stephen to discuss her work, which moves between personal memory and collective history. Filmmaker Ross McElwee discussed his intimate film Remake with IDFA programmer Maria Campaña Ramia, reflecting on his decades-long practice of making personal documentaries and how loss reshapes both memories and methods.

On Thursday, November 21, the IDFA Awards Ceremony took place in the Eye Filmmuseum, announcing the winners of the 38th edition of IDFA. The IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition went to A Fox Under a Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei. The IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition went to Past Future Continuous by Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani.

Additional awards and special mentions were also presented in the International, Envision, Short, Cross-section, and New Media categories. View all award winners and find the jury members for IDFA 2025.

In 2025, IDFA launched an ‘impact trajectory’ as part of the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science's ‘impact pilots for cultural bis institutions’ research project. 'Bis institutions' are leading cultural organizations that are part of the basic cultural infrastructure (BIS) in the Netherlands and receive a four-year subsidy. Under the guidance of the Impact Centre Erasmus at Erasmus University Rotterdam, IDFA met with other bis institutions on several occasions to exchange information about what impact is and how it can be researched in cultural organizations. The focus was on drawing up an impact objective and a Theory of Change, and testing these using various measuring instruments and research methods.

Audience research

After various effects from IDFA's Theory of Change had been operationalized, a survey was conducted after the festival. More than 1,600 visitors to five different award-winning films received a questionnaire. Nearly 300 visitors subsequently completed the survey. More than 85% of respondents considered the documentary they watched to be of high quality and agreed that watching the documentary helped them to better understand important social issues. In addition, more than 80% appreciated the context provided by IDFA (including the film description, an introduction, or an aftertalk), especially among respondents who were visiting IDFA for the first time. In addition, more than 90% of respondents said they discussed the film with others after the screening, and more than 80% of respondents felt a connection with the people portrayed in the film.

Sense of significance 

Partly because of this, it can be said that people who visit IDFA experience a shared sense of significance. More than 80% of respondents also agreed that the documentary offered new perspectives on the subject covered in the film, and more than 75% indicated that they thought more critically about the subject covered in the film.

Finally, more than 90% of respondents indicated that they were emotionally moved by the documentary, and nearly 80% of respondents indicated that they were intellectually stimulated by the film. This confirms the intended effect of people being moved by the documentaries screened during IDFA. Based on this pilot study, we can cautiously conclude that many of the intended effects on the IDFA audience actually occur during the festival. All in all, an informative pilot that leaves us wanting more.

IDFA's audience program is made possible by VriendenLoterij, VPRO, Fonds 21, Brook Foundation, de Volkskrant, WePresent by WeTransfer, Oxfam Novib, Beeld & Geluid, De Groene Amsterdammer, National Geographic Documentary Films, NPO, Follow the Money, GVB, Pathé, OneWorld, Creative Europe Media, Nederlands Filmfonds, Vfonds, het Cultuurfonds and IDFA’s Friends, Young Doc Circle, Special Friends.

IDFA DocLab is supported by: The Ministry of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Creative Europe MEDIA, CLICKNL, Creative Industries Fund NL, Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition (CIIIC), Netherlands Film Fund, Agog and IDFA Special Friends+.

DocLab Research Collaborations: MIT Open Documentary Lab, POPKRAFT, ONASSIS ONX.

Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, ARTIS-Planetarium, Beeld & Geluid, Diversion cinema, Droog, PHI, Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, Voices of VR, and We Make VR.