TEHRAN – Five films from Iran will participate in the 38th Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA), which will be held in the Netherlands from November 13th to 23rd.
According to a report from ILNA, Iranian productions participating in IDFA2025 include “Cutting Through Rocks” directed by Mohammadreza Eini and Sara Karki, and “A Fox Under a Pink” directed by Mehrdad Oskouei. “Moon”, Morteza Attabaki’s “32 Meters”, Masoud Bakshi’s “All My Sisters”, and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Fellow Citizen”.
“Cutting Through Rocks” is a co-production between Iran, Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada.
This 94-minute documentary, which will be shown for the first time in the Netherlands in the Best of Fest category, follows Sara Shaverdi, the first woman elected to the parliament of a village in rural Iran.
She promised to curb child marriage, guarantee girls’ education, and secure much-needed gas connections for villages. However, she soon realized that she received little open support from the community. She continues to do a lot of work behind closed doors to get things done. In my free time, I secretly teach girls how to ride motorcycles.
Despite the pressures of the patriarchy, Sarah does not give up. She stands up even when the men around her question the sincerity of her motives.
The documentary and its indomitable protagonist received positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the World Cinema Awards Jury Award for Best Documentary.
“The Fox Under the Pink Moon” is a co-production between Iran, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Denmark. The 76-minute documentary will make its world premiere in the International Competition category.
At just 16 years old, Soraya is already creating amazing drawings and sculptures that are as beautiful as they are dark. This strong-willed Afghan sculptor and illustrator has been trying for five years to leave Iran and return to his mother in Austria.
Mehrdad Oskouei directed the film entirely remotely, with Soraya filming all the footage over a five-year period using his own cell phone.
The material is interspersed with her drawings and surreal animated shots. For Soraya, creating art is more than just idle pastime. She pours all her worries, joys and fears into her paintings and sculptures made from soaked egg cartons and clay she finds along her routes. Many of her paintings feature recurring characters that Soraya identifies with, such as her faithful fox who is her traveling companion, the pink moon that always watches over her, and the clown who never smiles.
The Iranian-Turkish co-production “32 Meters” (84 minutes) will have its world premiere in the Luminous section of the festival.
The documentary portrays Halime as someone who does not identify with the traditional image of women in Turkey’s patriarchal village society. She believes there is more to life than a home and caring for children. So she decided to organize a shooting competition for women. However, this idea is not widely accepted by the men in the village.
“32 Meters” depicts with warmth and understated humor the women who bravely defend themselves against the claims that guns are “not toys” and that shooting is a man’s job. Cameras are present in these intimate conversations, both indoors and out, capturing how communities carefully dare to embrace subtle change, showing that even the most entrenched ideas about gender roles can be changed.
The result is a hopeful portrait of an independent-minded woman who, with a close-knit community, enthusiasm, perseverance, and the support of a growing number of female friends and male allies, succeeds in challenging the traditional status quo.
“All My Sisters” was co-produced by Iran, Austria, France and Germany. The 78-minute documentary will make its world premiere in the International Competition category.
In Tehran, sisters Maya and Zahra are growing up as carefree girls, swinging in playground bars, playing with dolls, and playing pranks. However, many restrictions imposed by society gradually enter their lives through traditional families.
Their uncle, filmmaker Masoud Bakshi, follows them from their childhood in 2007 to the present day, 18 years later. In this panel story, he shows images of himself to grown women.
“Fellow Citizen” is a 1983 film by the late famous film director Abbas Kiarostami. The 51-minute film will be screened in the “Dead Angle: Institutions” section.
Many of Kiarostami’s films are built on deceptively simple premises. In this work, he uses a telephoto lens to photograph a busy intersection in Tehran. There, there are traffic policemen who are tasked with ensuring that only authorized vehicles are allowed to pass. This creates a fascinating exchange between the police officer and the driver, who begs him to let them pass.
People without permits try to convince people that their case is special and that they need to rush to the nearest hospital, for example to quickly deliver something to a store or just go to work. One driver even took an X-ray to back up his claim.
As traffic chaos continues to increase, it is the job of police officers to decide who is allowed to pass. He is not a harsh authority, but one who is open to the driver’s inventive arguments.
Iranian artist wins first Wendy Gutman Award
In addition to the film screening, Iranian-Dutch filmmaker and immersive media artist Ali Eslami will receive the inaugural Wendy Gutman Award at this year’s IDFA.
The prize, worth €40,000, recognizes Eslami’s groundbreaking work in VR and immersive art. It will be submitted to him on October 17 ahead of IDFA.
The award recognizes creators who have created groundbreaking, connecting and innovative work in the documentary or immersive realm. The jury praised Eslami’s work as “unique, exciting and autonomous.”
The Iranian-Dutch artist is considered one of the most innovative creators in the field of immersive art. His work moves between VR, interactive simulations, and physical installations, creating poetic experiences that blur the lines between reality and virtuality.
The award was established by Stichting Educatie en Cultuur (SEC) in memory of former director Wendela Schertema. The Foundation, in consultation with the jury, decided to name the award after her pen name, Wendy Gutman.
Ali Eslami (34), born in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi province, lives and works in the Netherlands and is considered one of the most innovative creators in the field of immersive art. His practice spans VR, interactive simulations, and physical installations, creating poetic experiences where the lines between reality and virtual begin to blur.
Eslami describes his work as “poetic engineering,” a way of exploring how memories, perceptions, and emotions are formed in the digital world.
In his virtual world, False Mirror, he developed a completely self-constructed universe in which time and space are real. Drawing inspiration from games and architecture, his artistic practice creates new forms of meaning and experience, demonstrating how gaming technology can evolve into an autonomous and deeply personal artistic language.
Eslami’s research deals with long-term, practice-based research that builds and grows through speculative thinking and world-building.
His work engages with and plays with temporal and spatial studies of memory, computation, human cognition, and emotion, but is often informed by non-Western philosophical frameworks such as Suhrawardi’s illuminationism.
This line of inquiry creates a form of poetic engineering that explores the possibilities between reality and unreality.
His engineering background and passion for video games fostered an obsession with cybernetics and computing, and continues to fuel his curiosity about the changing role of form and function in creating virtual worlds.
Eslami is no stranger to IDFA, having won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Nonfiction in 2016. In 2020 he won the Gorden Kalf Award in the Nerd Funk category, and in 2024 his work was selected by IFFR.
IDFA is a leading international documentary organization that connects filmmakers, artists, audiences and professionals from around the world and provides a space for exchange, collaboration and inspiration.
Its extensive scope includes a year-round documentary hub in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, as well as film and new media release festivals, funding initiatives, markets, talent development and educational programs.
Photo: A scene from “32 Meters” by Morteza Atabaki.
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