Best of IDFA on Tour 2025

Poland | 2024 | Maciej J. Drygas | 81 min. | No spoken word

Trains opens with a quote from Franz Kafka: “There is plenty of hope. An infinite amount of hope. But not for us.” These words hang like a dark cloud over this found footage documentary, which creates a collective portrait of people in 20th century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies.

Powerful scenes showing steam locomotives and railroad cars being assembled feel like a celebration of human ingenuity and labor. People dressed in festive attire embark on a rail journey. But these cheerful scenes soon make way for military transport: soldiers being deployed to the frontlines—quickly followed by civilians evacuating, a procession of ragged prisoners-of-war, and amputee soldiers.

Times change, the pattern repeats. The archival material in this wordless film evokes an inevitable cycle of delight and destruction, beauty and bitterness. The image of a tangle of railroad tracks and switches raises the inevitable question: Which route will humanity choose?

Winner of the IDFA Award for Best Film in the International Competition

France | 2024 | Auberi Edler | 118 min. | Dutch subtitles

It’s 2023, and in a small conservative town in Pennsylvania an intense cultural and ideological battle is raging around the public school curriculum. With elections approaching for the majority of seats on the school board, fundamentalist board candidates are on the campaign trail, roaming Elizabethtown’s leafy neighborhoods.

The rise of white supremacy, conspiracism and Christian nationalism are unstoppable in the ranks of the local Republican Party. Democrats justifiably fear this will bring a ban on literature with ‘sexual content’ and the stigmatization of LGBTQ+ children. The camera is present over the course of many months, observing at intensely uneasy board meetings, on the streets and in the churches, where there is no overlap between worldviews. A paper-thin layer of civility shrouds the all-pervasive sense of distrust, anger and fear.

It is almost always adults we see championing a future course for the younger generation—the young people we see in school hallways and the classic yellow school buses. This tense and dystopian portrait lays bare the fragility of the democratic process in a deeply divided society.

Winner of the IDFA Award for Best Directing in the International Competition

Poland, Qatar | 2024 | Zvika Gregory Portnoy, Zuzanna Solakiewicz | 78 min. | Dutch subtitles

In 2021, the border area between Poland and Belarus became a forbidden zone, three kilometers wide, where refugees found themselves brutally trapped. They had become the stakes in a political game: Belarus supposedly guaranteed free passage to the EU, but in Poland the refugees met with pushbacks, forcing them back across the border. Once in Belarus again, they were driven back towards Poland—a horrific stalemate in an inhospitable landscape of treacherous marshes.

Maciek lives with his family on the Polish side of the border. He has taken in an exhausted Syrian refugee, the 27-year-old Alhyder. After he has regained his strength, Alhyder faces the big question: what now? Where can he go without putting either himself or Maciek in danger?

The tension is palpable in this sensitive, sharply observant documentary. Without a hint of sensationalism, the camera reads the emotions on the faces of the silent Polish family members and their grateful guest. The situation is dire, and a solution remains out of reach. Yet, at the same time, the film is permeated by the warmth of human help and contact.

Winner for the Best Cinematography in de International Competition

Germany | 2024 | Rebecca Blöcher | 24 min. | Dutch subtitles

The mother of animation director Rebecca Blöcher didn’t want to live an ordinary life. She wanted “something more,” she explains in this stop-motion film. The people around her didn’t understand—in a letter written in 1968, a girlfriend criticizes her for going out on her own and making men jealous, while advising her to dress in a more “feminine” way and to join a cooking course. Blöcher’s mother brushed aside the advice. Years later still, she divorced her husband and stepped into the big wide world.

In Mama Micra the mother is a figure made of felt who recalls, in her own voice, her powerful urge to find freedom: “I was a real vagabond,” she explains. She traveled to Syria and Beirut, and envied the nomads in the desert. During the last 10 years of her life she lived in a Nissan Micra, washing in the morning in hotel bathrooms and sneaking into breakfast rooms to eat.

Her freedom came at a cost. She lost contact with her daughter, who counterpoints her mother’s account with her own recollections. But no harm is irreparable in this affectionate film.

Special Mention in de IDFA Competition for Short Documentary

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