Guest of Honor Susana de Sousa Dias sits down with IDFA’s Artistic Director for an in-depth conversation on her practice and legacy. Known for her singular reworking of archival images and sound, acclaimed filmmaker, curator, and scholar de Sousa Dias has developed a body of work that interrogates dictatorship, colonial legacies and the fragile terrain of memory. Her films—rigorously formal yet deeply affective—transform official archives into counter-histories, where silence, absence, and testimony emerge through powerful acts of subversion. In retracing the intersections of cinema, memory, and political imagination, de Sousa Dias affirms the power of film to reopen historical wounds while also creating space for new forms of resistance, remembrance, and emancipation.

This dialogue accompanies a retrospective of her filmography as well as a Top 10 program curated for the festival, offering audiences insight into the historical, aesthetic, and ethical questions at the core of her work. 

This conversation is moderated by IDFA’s Artistic Director, Isabel Arrate Fernandez.