IDFA-supported films selected for the Berlinale 2025

Two IDFA Bertha Fund-backed titles and one Forum title will screen in the Panorama Dokumente selection, dedicated to unconventional cinema.

Khartoum (2025) by Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea M Ahmed en Phil Cox received IBF support in 2023.

In 2022, four Sudanese filmmakers and a British writer-director began filming the lives and dreams of five Khartoum residents. Street boys Lokain and Wilson scavenge to buy two beautiful shirts; tea seller and single mother Khadmallah studies maths to start her own business; resistance volunteer Jawad protests the military regime; civil servant Majdi races pigeons with his son to escape office life. Soon after filming begins, the regime splits, war erupts, and over ten million people are displaced—including the filmmakers and their subjects. Using animation, green screen reconstructions, and dream sequences, they craft a lyrical portrait of five lives at a turning point in African history.

Under the Flags, the Sun (2025) by Juanjo Pereira received IBF support in 2021.

In 1989, the fall of Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship in Paraguay ended one of the world’s longest-running authoritarian regimes and led to the abandonment of its audiovisual archives. Crafted to shape national identity and celebrate the regime, this material was left to fade. Decades later, recovered footage—including newsreels, propaganda films, and declassified documents—reveals the hidden mechanisms of Stroessner’s rule. Paraguayan archives expose indoctrination and the cult of Stroessner, while foreign archives highlight Cold War power games that sustained the dictatorship. This film is a visual journey through 20th-century media history and an archaeology of a nation still ruled by its past.

Letters from Wolf Street (2025) by Arjun Talwar was presented at Forum in 2023.

A street in central Warsaw is the focus of this witty and personal portrait of Poland. Filmmaker Arjun Talwar immigrated a decade ago but still struggles to fit in. To accelerate his integration, he films his neighbours, uncovering hidden secrets and revealing a host of charming inhabitants. With his friend Mo, another immigrant-turned-filmmaker, he explores lives caught between past and present, imagined and real homelands. The street connects them all, offering solace in everyday melancholy. Along this kilometre-long stretch, a picture of modern Europe emerges, exposing contradictions and anxieties as a foreign filmmaker holds up a mirror to Poland.

Still: Under the Flags, the Sun