Five Middle Eastern Documentary Films Win Major Awards At IDFA 2025
Featuring new works by Oskouei, Ahmadvand, Khosrovani, Hilmandi, Ashawi, and Khosravibaledi.
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On Thursday evening, the winners of the thirty eighth edition of IDFA were announced during a warm and crowded ceremony at Eye Filmmuseum. The festival awarded A Fox Under a Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei as Best Film in the International Competition, while Past Future Continuous by Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani received Best Film in the Envision Competition.
Among the other Middle Eastern winners were Under the Same Sky by Khalil Ashawi, honored with a Special Mention in the DocLab Immersive section, and Paikar by Dawood Hilmandi, which received the Best First Feature award. Dreams of the Wild Oaks by Marjan Khosravibaledi was also recognized with a Special Mention in the IDFA Forum, marking an important moment for emerging voices from the region.
The presence of Middle Eastern filmmakers at IDFA this year felt both powerful and quietly inspiring. Their films showed how this region carries a deep capacity for documentary storytelling, moving between personal memory, social struggle, and artistic experimentation. Each work offers its own voice, yet together they reflect a landscape shaped by resilience, imagination, and lived experience. It is a gentle reminder that the Middle East remains one of the most vibrant sources of documentary cinema today, reaching global audiences with honesty and emotional depth.
A Fox Under a Pink Moon
Director: Mehrdad Oskouei
Countries: Iran, France, United Kingdom, United States, Denmark
Award: Best Film – International Competition, IDFA 2025 (€15,000 prize)
A Fox Under a Pink Moon follows the life of Soraya, a sixteen year old Afghan artist trying to escape years of violence, separation, and uncertainty. The film is built entirely from footage she recorded on her phone over five years, capturing her escape attempts, her drawings, the bruises on her body, and the fragile moments of hope she finds in small acts of creation. Mehrdad Oskouei shapes this intimate self portrait with sensitivity, letting Soraya’s voice guide the rhythm of the story. Her fox, pink moon, and silent clown become symbols of survival, turning the film into a personal journey of resistance and imagination.
Oskouei has been shaping his own space in documentary cinema for many years. Born in Tehran and trained in filmmaking and photography, he has always moved toward stories that sit quietly at the edges of society. His work is known for patience, closeness, and a kind of listening that lets people speak in their own rhythm.
Across two decades, his films have traveled to festivals around the world and slowly formed a long relationship with IDFA. From early titles like My Mother’s House, Lagoon and The Other Side of Burka to the later presence of Sunless Shadows, his connection with the festival has grown step by step. A Fox Under a Pink Moon feels like a continuation of that path, bringing together the themes he has returned to again and again: fragile lives, private courage, and the small moments that say more than large events.
Past Future Continuous
Directors: Morteza Ahmadvand, Firouzeh Khosrovani
Countries: Iran, Norway, Italy
Award: Best Film – Envision Competition, IDFA 2025 (€15,000 prize)
Past Future Continuous unfolds like a quiet window into distance, memory, and the fragile threads that keep a family connected across continents. The film follows Maryam, who left Iran decades ago and now watches over her elderly parents in Tehran through a network of security cameras. What begins as a practical solution slowly becomes an emotional mirror: long pauses, small gestures, and the passing of time inside the apartment she once called home.
The filmmakers weave surveillance footage together with childhood home videos, building a layered portrait of exile and longing. At moments the film feels almost like a diary, shaped by silence, space, and the soft ache of being far from the people who shaped your earliest memories. Birds that appear throughout the film take on a gentle symbolic weight, sometimes pointing to confinement, sometimes to the courage to break free.
Firouzeh Khosrovani is a filmmaker from Tehran whose work often centers on memory, identity, and the personal histories embedded inside Iranian society. She studied visual arts in Milan and later completed a Master’s in Journalism in Tehran, a combination that gives her films both visual clarity and narrative depth. From Life Train and Rough Cut to Fest of Duty, her films trace the quiet shifts inside family life and social change.
Her 2020 film Radiograph of a Family became a turning point, winning major awards at IDFA and confirming her as one of the most thoughtful documentary voices from Iran. With Past Future Continuous, she continues this exploration of intimate histories and the emotional weight carried across borders.
Morteza Ahmadvand is a multimedia artist and filmmaker from Khorramabad whose work often reflects his background in painting. Trained at the University of Tehran, he brings a strong sense of visual composition to his films, moving freely between installation, video art, and documentary. His projects explore themes of freedom, memory, and the generational tensions that shape contemporary Iranian life. His work has appeared in major exhibitions, and several pieces are part of the Centre Pompidou collection, marking him as a voice that moves naturally between gallery spaces and cinema.
Under the Same Sky
Director: Khalil Ashawi
Countries: Palestine, Turkey
Award: Special Mention – IDFA DocLab Competition for Immersive Non-Fiction, IDFA 2025
Under the Same Sky places the viewer inside Gaza through a 360 degree camera carried by journalist Sami. The calm sea behind him and the ruins rising ahead create a quiet contrast that reflects the tension of everyday life under siege. As he drives along the coastline in a press vehicle, he meets people searching for what remains of their homes and speaks with journalists who continue working despite exhaustion and fear.
The immersive format turns war from an abstract concept into something lived and immediate. Wherever the viewer turns, another broken street or damaged building fills the frame, removing the distance that usually separates an audience from a conflict. Through its still moments and direct conversations, the film shows how people navigate the fragile space between survival, resilience, and the need to keep telling the truth.
Khalil Ashawi, together with co director Hadeel Arja, builds an experience that feels both close and overwhelming at the same time. Their work suggests how journalism, in places like Gaza, becomes more than a profession. It becomes a form of presence, a way of insisting that the world does not look away.
Paikar
Director: Dawood Hilmandi
Countries: Netherlands, Afghanistan
Awards:
• IDFA Award for Best First Feature (€5,000 prize)
• Special Mention – IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film
• FIPRESCI Award
Paikar looks at the personal history of Dawood Hilmandi, an Afghan filmmaker shaped by war, displacement, and the burden of a name that has followed him since childhood. In his family, paikar means war or warrior. It is a title carried with pride, but in the film it becomes something more complex, tied to a past he can no longer ignore. The story follows him as he returns home to confront the distance that conflict created inside his family and to reconnect with his aging father.
Hilmandi grew up between borders, first leaving Afghanistan, then Iran, before eventually settling in Amsterdam. Questions of home, identity, and belonging stayed with him across these shifts. After a personal loss, he decides to go back to Iran, spending slow days with his father and allowing old conversations and routines to return in their own time. Their path then leads them to Afghanistan, where the shadow of Covid-19 adds another layer to their uncertain journey.
Within this fragile space, father and son begin to move closer, revealing how memory, silence, and shared history can shape relationships across decades.
In conversations about the film, Hilmandi describes how Paikar grew from trying to understand a father shaped by war, loss, and the long history of Hazara persecution. Making the film meant stepping into a cultural taboo and opening wounds that had stayed hidden for years. It was a difficult process, but also a rare chance to rebuild a fragile bond and to give shape to a story often left unspoken.
Paikar stands as a personal testimony and a reminder that some stories from Afghanistan are best told by those who have carried them through their own lives.
Dreams of the Wild Oaks
Director: Marjan Khosravibaledi
Country: Iran (co-production: France, Spain)
Section: IDFA Forum 2025 – Rough Cut Project
Award: Special Mention – IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut Project
Dreams of the Wild Oaks is an Iranian project by Marjan Khosravibaledi, developed as a Rough Cut Project at this year’s IDFA Forum. The film follows Samaneh, a young Bakhtiari girl whose search for rare and endangered birds slowly becomes a way to reclaim control over her future. What begins as a simple journey across mountains and villages reveals a deeper attempt to resist a forced marriage and to question an old tradition known as Cease Blood Sacrifice.
As the story moves through her steps and encounters, the film observes the pressures surrounding her and the relationship she holds with her father. It stays close to the rhythms of her world, allowing the landscape, the customs, and her quiet determination to shape the narrative.
The project’s Special Mention at the Forum reflects both its urgency and the clarity of its vision. Even in its rough cut form, Dreams of the Wild Oaks stands out for the way it carries a young girl’s voice outward from a remote region to an international stage. It suggests that stories like Samaneh’s have the power to travel far when they are given the space to be heard.
The brilliance of Middle Eastern filmmakers at this year’s IDFA was truly remarkable. Their stories came from different places and different histories, yet together they shaped one of the most memorable presences of the festival. I congratulate all of these directors and their production and distribution teams, and I hope the attention they received this year opens more space for documentary voices from the region. These films show how much remains to be discovered when personal stories are allowed to travel freely.