Ali Eslami is the recipient of the first Wendy Gutman Award

IDFA is delighted to announce that Iranian-Dutch artist and filmmaker Ali Eslami has been awarded the very first Wendy Gutman Award. The prize, worth €40,000, honors an artist who works in a groundbreaking, connective, and visionary way within documentary or immersive media.

The award was established by the Stichting Educatie en Cultuur (SEC) in memory of its former director, Wendela Scheltema. In consultation with the jury, the foundation decided to name the award after her pseudonym, Wendy Gutman.

A pioneer in immersive media
Ali Eslami (Mashhad, 1991) lives and works in the Netherlands and is considered one of the most innovative makers in the field of immersive art. His practice spans VR, interactive simulations, and physical installations, creating poetic experiences in which the line between the real and the virtual begins to blur. Eslami describes his work as “poetic engineering”: a way to explore how memory, perception, and emotion are shaped in a digital world.

With his virtual world False Mirror, he developed a fully self-constructed universe where time and space become tangible. Drawing inspiration from gaming and architecture, his artistic practice creates new forms of meaning and experience—demonstrating how game technologies can evolve into an autonomous and deeply personal artistic language.

Jury report
The jury, chaired by Melle Daamen, praised Eslami’s work as “idiosyncratic, exciting, and autonomous.” They unanimously decided he should be the first recipient of the Wendy Gutman Award, concluding: “Ali Eslami is a cat that walks by himself.”

Eslami is no stranger to IDFA: in 2016 he won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Non-Fiction (with Mamali Shafahi), in 2020 he received a Gouden Kalf for Nerd_Funk, and in 2024 his work was selected for IFFR.

The Wendy Gutman Award will be presented on Friday, October 17, 2025, in collaboration with Het Documentaire Paviljoen in Amsterdam.