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.