Two projects awarded Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant

The Love Files by Sanne De Wilde and Samir Veen and All the Downtime by Ant Hampton (produced by Time Based Editions) have been selected for the 2026 Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant. Each project receives €10,000 from the Netherlands Film Fund to finalize and present the work in an exhibition at the 20th edition of IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam this November. 

The two selected works both expose systems that govern people’s lives, but stay largely unseen. Centered around an immigration file (The Love Files) and a data center (All the Downtime), both projects cut through the machinery of those systems to make the people at the heart of them impossible to ignore. Both participatory works give the audience an active role, inviting them to look closer, listen more carefully, and consider what action might follow. 

How do you prove that your love is real? For transnational couples applying for residency or family reunification, this can be more than a philosophical question. Photographs, WhatsApp messages, love letters, emails and travel records become evidence: carefully selected fragments of a relationship, assembled into a “love file”. A government official they never meet then decides whether the relationship is genuine. That judgment can determine whether a couple is able to build a life together in the same country. The process can take up to months or even years, which puts the relationship itself under enormous pressure. What counts as enough proof? And what happens to a relationship when it has to convince a stranger?  

The Love Files grew partly from Sanne De Wilde’s own experience of going through this process with her partner Majesty. At IDFA 2026, the project will be presented as an interactive installation in the DocLab exhibition. Together with theatre-maker Samir Veen (Ontroerend Goed), De Wilde turns the situation around: you become the love judge. You are handed several files and asked to decide whether you believe the relationship is real. What are you really judging? And if you had to prove your own love, what would you submit? 

“It is daring to make the participant the judge of the one thing that should be beyond assessment. This might be confrontational, but hopefully also, in an absurd way, deeply humanizing." – Michiel van Opstal, film consultant at Netherlands Film Fund

“This project feels particularly urgent at a time where migration and family reunification is under fire, and while AI is making the very idea of ‘proof’ completely manipulatable.” – Nina van Doren, programmer at IDFA DocLab  

The systems in Ant Hampton’s new work operate on a radically different scale, yet here too the focus is on the people caught inside, which, in this instance, may end up being most of us. All the Downtime begins as a visitor tour through a highly automated warehouse where human workers are monitored, tracked, and optimized by systems that have already begun to replace them.

A sudden powercut means those systems experience ‘downtime’—ironically, a break the workers dream of. As the visitors seize their chance and occupy the robotized space, the dark logic behind its operations begins to be unravelled and revealed: the voracious energy demands, the vast physical infrastructure, the endless mountains of stuff and even the warehouse architecture now being repurposed to detain people.  

Seated together as a group, book in hand, audiences follow audio instructions to page through what seem to be photographs. With a live performer as a guide, elements of the story are brought into the shared space, questioning how and what we are ‘seeing’. And as the system breaks down, something very human breaks through. Play, desire, chaos, and disorder overrule prediction and control. And what starts as downtime, gathers into something far more radical. 

“Ant Hampton turns the single act of reading into a collective and political experience. In a time when people feel powerless towards AI and its dreams and demons, the joined act of turning pages brings back some unpredictable magic in a dehumanized system of control.”  – Michiel van Opstal, film consultant at Netherlands Film Fund

“All the Downtime turns deep unease into something potent. You feel like you are uncovering the system while moving through it yourself, until that suspicion and frustration starts to fuel a desire to act and reclaim what's human.” – Nina van Doren, programmer at IDFA DocLab 

For almost a decade, the Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA DocLab have joined forces to support immersive and interactive projects for an international stage. Previous recipients of the grant include: Alaa Minawi, Lisa Schamlé, Studio Moniker, Mathilde Renault, Jeroen van Loon and Dries Depoorter. Following the premieres at IDFA DocLab, projects previously funded through this grant have received praise at prestigious international festivals such as SXSW, Sundance, CPH:Dox, Sheffield DocFest, and many others.