This year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), taking place in the Dutch city between Nov. 13-23, will open with a short documentary selection as a way of “showcasing the creativity and artistic range of short documentary film.”
The opening shorts selection comprises “As I Lay Dying” by Mohammadreza Farzad and Pegah Ahangarani; “Intersecting Memory” by Shayma’ Awawdeh; and “Happiness” by Firat Yücel. Artistic director Isabel Arrate Fernandez, heading to her first edition in the position after Orwa Nyrabia left the role earlier in the year, said in a statement that the programming team believes “the selection of films set the tone for a festival that explores major issues of the present, that makes room for new voices, fresh forms, and unexpected perspectives.”
All three short films, despite varying greatly in approach, touch upon issues of sociopolitical unrest, an overwhelming outpour of distressing news on mass and social media and the particular kind of grief that follows war and displacement.
“As I Lay Dying” examines video footage from the 2009 Green Movement protests in Tehran. Speaking with Variety, the duo says they began watching the footage in 2020, almost a decade after the events, when they finally felt there was “enough distance” to look back at them. “While watching, we came across some footage in which the person holding the camera, terrified for life, suddenly began to run,” recalls Farzad. “We were witnessing something utterly pure — images that could never be captured in professional narrative cinema, and that would seem nearly impossible even within documentary filmmaking involving a professional crew.”
On why to release the film now, five years after the duo first made it, the two say that they knew that “history is always repeating itself.” “We didn’t imagine that only a few months after finishing our film, we would once again see, both in Iran and soon after across the world, a new surge of political and social unrest,” Ahangarani adds. “Still, we believe that mobile phone footage captured by ordinary people will continue, for years to come, to reveal deep and enduring truths. Making such films today is, perhaps, one of the few ways to build alternative narratives and to map the pains and struggles of being human.”
The duo felt “exhausted, bruised, beaten and worn out” after watching the footage and “reliving the collective depression that spread after those days.”
The sentiment is familiar to Yücel, whose “Happiness” chronicles the sleepless nights of a group of activists as they follow the news from Palestine and the Middle East from Amsterdam. “The film evolved in direct response to the ongoing realities of genocide, displacement, and capitalist extraction across Palestine, Congo and Sudan,” says the director. “The film was born quite literally out of sleepless nights, not only of one person but of many people who share this experience.”
On the format for “Happiness,” told entirely through screen captures with voice-over narration, producer Aylin Kuryel says it allowed the film to “rearrange and reframe” what is already happening in a digital space. “This opens up an artistic and political potential: to think with the images we constantly encounter rather than merely looking at them. The person at the computer is not simply a passive observer of images of violence; they are already part of a collective desire to act.”
“Exhaustion is not only a psychological state, it’s political,” adds the producer. “It comes from being constantly addressed by power, constantly witnessing injustice, and being asked to keep functioning as if nothing is happening, and of course, from the different forms of oppression exerted on political mobilizations. But exhaustion also contains a possibility: the recognition that no one can act alone. This is what we wanted to address.”
“Intersecting Memory,” courtesy of IDFA
In “Intersecting Memory,” Awawdeh directly addresses her mother as she recalls her childhood in Palestine against the backdrop of the Second Intifada. More than two decades later, she opens a box of old videotapes to search for memories of that time. The project began as Awawdeh converted the tapes into digital copies, recognizing streets and faces of the people on screen. “But something else captured me,” she says. “Childhood memories that began to resurface with viewing.”
“I started searching the footage for children, and their scenes were numerous and very moving,” she adds. “That’s when I realized I had a responsibility to tell something about my city. I wanted to present our narrative as Palestinians, in our voices and our images, as we live it from within the place we belong to and carry inside us.”
Like Farzad and Ahangarani, Awawdeh felt history repeating itself as she worked on the project. “I started watching this material at the same time as the outbreak of the genocide in Gaza, and it was very difficult. When I began working with Mahmoud Ahmad, the film editor, who is from Gaza and lives in Belgium, he literally said to me: ‘Nothing is different.’”
Asked about the importance of having a major festival like IDFA open with a selection of shorts, Awawdeh says the form is characterized “by an intensity of feeling and idea.” “Choosing three films connected to our current political reality is a necessary step to affirm that we are part of the global struggle against oppression and colonialism.”
“[It] is a radical act,” echoes the team behind “As I Lay Dying.” “Not every story needs to be told at length; some find their meaning precisely in brevity. From our perspective, this decision is one that takes the side of art, because art is never about the length of a narrative. We are genuinely grateful that IDFA, setting aside conventional festival and managerial considerations, has chosen to stand with art and with the power of human stories. We thank them not only on our own behalf but also on behalf of many short documentary filmmakers.”
Yücel also thanks the festival for their political stance, saying the team is happy their film is “being screened in a year when IDFA signed the cultural boycott against Israeli institutions with ties to militarization. Events like this are not just spaces for cultural dialogue; they should be platforms where people actively challenge both institutions and their own mindsets, pushing for political and structural change.”
