IDFA names Susana de Sousa Dias as Guest of Honor for IDFA 2025

IDFA will highlight de Sousa Dias’s singular approach to archival images and cinematic form, showing a selection of her works—known for interrogating dictatorship, colonial legacies, and the fragile terrain of memory.

Her signature style emerged with Still Life (2005), an archival meditation on the Portuguese fascist regime Estado Novo, Europe’s longest running dictatorship. International recognition followed with 48 (2009), which juxtaposes the regime’s photographs of political prisoners with testimonies decades later, revealing the violence embedded in every image.

Her latest works turn to the neo-colonial archives of Brazil, including the world premiere of Fordlândia Panacea (2025), an excavation of the former company-town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rainforest in 1928.

With the Retrospective, IDFA presents a comprehensive look at de Sousa Dias’s uncompromising approach to creating dissident counter-archives and her distinctive visual style. By creating space for distance and reflection, her work prompts us to question how political histories are told through film and how we approach the narration of the past. Rather than using archival footage as mere illustration, she reframes these images of power to reveal erased histories of violence and resistance to authority.

These themes are extended to her Top 10 program, which presents an exploration into collective memory and filmmakers rewriting their political narratives. The selection includes Monangambééé by Sarah Maldoror and Images of the World and the Inscription of War by Harun Farocki.

An extended conversation with IDFA’s Guest of Honor Susana de Sousa Dias will be the centerpiece Talk of this edition.

Dead Angle is IDFA’s multi-year focus program that looks at the systemic structures that shape our lives—using documentary cinema to reveal what remains outside our direct field of vision. 

This year’s program focuses on institutions, inviting a close examination of how they operate, where they falter, and their role moving forward. Documentary film offers a lens to trace their histories and contradictions—and to reflect on their role in shaping society and the civic structures we collectively sustain today. 

Among confirmed titles are the close studies of democracy and the democratic process. Frederick Wiseman’s State Legislature (2006) offers an observational portrait of the Idaho Legislature, capturing the slow, deliberate unfolding of lawmaking by citizen legislators. Several titles extend our perspective beyond the Western scope, examining the afterlives of colonial institutions and the ways they are being contested and reclaimed. In How to Build a Library (2025) by Maia Lekow and Christopher King, we follow the renovation of a former colonial library in Nairobi as it is transformed into a center for African literature. In Checks and Balances (2015) by Malek Bensmaïl, we witness the journalists with Algeria’s El Watan newspaper continued fight for press freedom. 

The 19th edition of IDFA’s pioneering new media program, IDFA DocLab, returns with an immersive and interactive documentary program presented at de Brakke Grond, ARTIS-Planetarium, and @droog. This year’s theme, Off the Internet, explores the paradox of our time: a world perpetually connected through technology, at risk of disconnection by the same tools. The program grapples with the growing desire to disconnect, the impossibility of ever truly logging off, and the inherent privilege of stepping offline. With Off the Internet, DocLab turns to interactive and immersive art in search of new forms of presence and connection. 

The first announced titles include several physical and collective immersive experiences, including the world premieres of Nothing to See Here by Celine Daemen, and Handle with Care by Ontroerend Goed (presented in collaboration with de Brakke Grond).