TEHRAN - Five films from Iran will participate in the 38th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), which is set to be held from November 13 to 23 in the Netherlands. 

The Iranian participants in the IDFA 2025 include “Cutting Through Rocks” directed by Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki, “A Fox Under a Pink Moon” by Mehrdad Oskouei, “32 Meters” by Morteza Atabaki, “All My Sisters” by Massoud Bakhshi, and “Fellow Citizen” by Abbas Kiarostami, ILNA reported.

“Cutting Through Rocks” is a joint production of Iran, Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, the U.S., and Canada.

The 94-minute documentary, which will have its Dutch premiere in the Best of Fests section, shows Sara Shaverdi, the first woman ever elected to the council of her village in rural Iran. 

She promises to curb child marriage, guarantee education for girls, and also secure the long-awaited gas connection for the village. However, she soon discovers that she will receive little open support from the community. To get things done she continues much of her work behind closed doors. In her free time, she secretly teaches girls how to ride motorbikes.

Despite pressure from the patriarchal system, Sara doesn’t give up. She stands up to the men around her, even when they question the integrity of her motives. 

The documentary and its unyielding protagonist were well received at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary.

“A Fox Under a Pink Moon” is a joint production of Iran, France, the UK, and the U.S., and Denmark. The 76-minute documentary will have its world premiere in the International Competition section.

At just 16, Soraya is already creating stunning 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 join her mother in Austria.

Mehrdad Oskouei directed this film entirely remotely, with Soraya filming all the footage herself over five years using her phone.

This material is interspersed with shots of her drawings and surreal animations. Making art is no idle pastime for Soraya: she puts all her worries, joys, and fears into her drawings and the sculptures she makes from soaked egg cartons or clay that she finds along her routes. Many of her drawings feature recurring figures: a loyal fox who is her traveling companion, a pink moon that always watches over her, and a clown who never laughs—a character Soraya identifies with.

An Iran-Turkey production, “32 Meters,” 84 minutes, will have its world premiere at the Luminous section of the festival.

The documentary shows Halime, who doesn’t identify with the traditional image of women in her patriarchal Turkish village community. There’s more to life than looking after the house and children, she believes. So, she decides to organize a shooting competition for women. But this idea isn’t universally welcomed by the men in the village.

“32 Meters” follows the women with warmth and understated humor as they bravely defend themselves against arguments that guns are “not toys” and that shooting is a man’s business. The camera is present during these intimate conversations, both indoors and outdoors, capturing how the community cautiously dares to embrace subtle change, and showing that even the most entrenched ideas about gender roles can be shifted.

The result is a hopeful portrait of a close-knit community and an independent-minded woman who, with her enthusiasm and perseverance—along with the support of a growing group of female friends and male allies—succeeds in challenging the traditional status quo.

“All My Sisters” has been produced jointly by Iran, Austria, France, and Germany. The 78-minute documentary will have its world premiere in the International Competition section.

In Tehran, sisters Mahya and Zahra grow up as carefree young girls: swinging on the playground bars, playing with dolls, and getting up to mischief. But the many restrictions imposed by society gradually creep into their lives via their traditional family. 

Their uncle, filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi, follows them from their early childhood in 2007 to the present, 18 years later. In this frame story, he shows his footage to the now-adult women.

“Fellow Citizen” is 1983 movie by the late renowned filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The 51-minute film will be shown in the Dead Angle: Institutions section.

Many of Kiarostami’s films are built on a deceptively simple premise. In this work, he uses a telephoto lens to film a busy intersection in Tehran, where a traffic cop is tasked with letting through only cars that have a permit. This produces fascinating exchanges between the officer and the drivers, who plead with him to let them pass.

Those without a permit try to convince him that their case is special: they need to rush to a nearby hospital, for example, quickly drop something off at a shop, or simply get to work. One driver even produces an X-ray to back up his claim.

Amid the ever-growing traffic chaos, it’s the officer’s job to decide who to allow through. He is no harsh authority figure, but someone open to the inventive arguments of the motorists. 

Iranian artist to receive first Wendy Gutman Award

In addition to the film screenings, the Iranian-Dutch filmmaker and immersive media artist Ali Eslami will be the recipient of the very first Wendy Gutman Award at this year’s IDFA.

The award, worth €40,000, recognizes Eslami’s groundbreaking work in VR and immersive art. It will be presented to him on October 17, ahead of the IDFA.

The award recognizes a creator whose work is groundbreaking, connecting, and innovative within the documentary or immersive domain. The jury has praised Eslami’s work as “idiosyncratic, 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 in which the boundary between the real and the virtual blurs.

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.

Born in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province, Ali Eslami, 34, 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.

Eslami’s work deals with long-term, practice-based research that builds and grows through speculative thinking and world-building.

His work engages and plays with temporal and spatial investigations of memory, computation, human cognition, and emotions—often informed by non-Western philosophical frameworks, such as Suhrawardi's Illuminationism.

This line of inquiry results in forms of poetic engineering that seek the potential lying between the real and the unreal.

His engineering background and passion for video games nurtured an obsession with cybernetics and computation and continue to build his curiosity towards the shifting roles of form and function that create virtual worlds.

Eslami is no stranger to IDFA: In 2016, he won the IDFA DocLab Award for Best Immersive Non-Fiction. In 2020, he received a Gouden Kalf for Nerd Funk, and in 2024 his work was selected for IFFR.

IDFA is a leading international documentary institute that provides a space for exchange, collaboration, and inspiration—bringing together filmmakers, artists, audiences, and professionals from around the world. 

Its broad scope includes a public festival of films and new media, funding initiatives, markets, talent development, and education programs—alongside a year-round documentary hub in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark.

Photo: A scene from “32 Meters” by Morteza Atabaki.
 

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