Foreword
Photo: Director Firouzeh Khosrovani and Morteza Ahmadvand receiving the IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition for Past Future Continuous
Dear reader, presenting the work that the IDFA Bertha Fund accomplished in 2025 is particularly special to me. It has been a year of complete discovery understanding how the Fund functions as an organism, its team dynamics and strengths, its support mechanisms and importantly, its collaborative spirit. Over the span of this first year, I’ve come closer to grasping the Fund’s place within a global connected network, an incredible community of filmmakers creating work, supported by dedicated advisors, partners and structures everywhere. Our collective mandate is the same - independence, sustainability and safety to create impactful documentary cinema that can reach audiences and foster life changing momentum.
It’s a collective mandate that we are all fighting to keep whole against global and geopolitical threats, xenophobia, wars, ongoing genocides. 86% of the projects supported by the Fund in 2025 are being produced in countries where filmmakers and journalists face direct threats, as indexed by Reporters Without Borders. This number reflects the environments in which much of today’s vital documentary work is being made. However, I don’t really need that statistic to convince you, the shrinking of our freedoms is palpable everywhere, in filmmaking and in our daily lives.
With the means at the Fund’s disposal, you will read about 31 incredible projects that we financed at different stages of production, and another 60+ filmmakers that we were able to support in advancing their filmmaking craft through IDFA’s diverse training and market access programs. I also want to mention all the filmmakers that will not make it into these pages but that are equally important.
We spent 2025 advocating for their rights, attending regional markets to meet makers where they are, brainstorming creative solutions together, asking for advice from our knowledgeable colleagues worldwide, and just talking to each other often. There is so much strength in knowledge sharing and meaningful connection.
The work of the IDFA Bertha Fund in 2025 continues to nurture independent creative documentary films to create lasting impact. Whether they premiere in major festivals to win prestigious awards that shine global attention on their stories, play for several weeks to impressive cinema box offices locally, start a life changing process for the people on screen through the power of audience engagement, these films and their makers affect the world around them. That effect continues to be vital, and we are really privileged to engage in this momentum.
Selin Murat, Executive Director
Main partner of the IDFA Bertha Fund
Bertha Foundation supports activists, storytellers, and lawyers that are working to bring about social and economic justice, and human rights for all. Envisioning a society in which activists build collective power, stories come from many different voices, and law is used as a tool for justice. By investing in the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Foundation supports the global creative documentary field and films that make a difference.
"At the Bertha Foundation we show up and support those who speak truth to power; who bravely and boldly tackle the complex and difficult issues of holding the line against the corporations and the rightwing. Documentary filmmakers today are working in a time of televised genocide and mass starvation of Palestinians; large scale land take-over by military regimes and corporation; and the continued mass destruction of our natural world. In our second decade of supporting activists; storytellers and human rights work, we are passionate about supporting film makers recognizing films' extraordinary power to not only tell stories but to be drivers of change fostering solidarity amongst those demanding a more just world."
— The Bertha Foundation
