Foreword
Photo: IDFA screening of No Other Land followed by a Talk with filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham moderated by IDFA's Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia and filmmaker Laura Poitras
When reflecting on the year 2024, one realization rings deafeningly loud: making films has become increasingly difficult. The global film industry is in crisis. Production companies, sales agencies, funders, and film festivals are under pressure. There is less financing, diminishing interest, fewer distribution opportunities—amidst rising uncertainty, censorship, and fear. According to the World Press Freedom Index, we note that 90% of this year’s IDFA Bertha Fund-supported projects are made by filmmakers working in countries classified as “under threat” or “under severe threat” to press freedom. With the rise of right-wing regimes worldwide, the urgency to support independent, free, and courageous filmmaking sharply comes into focus.
Filmmakers today are on the frontlines—more often literally. They place their creativity, communities, and lives on the line to make films that, given the chance to thrive, could change our world. However, those very films often find shrinking support and limited distribution paths to find their audiences.
And yet, in the face of this strained environment, we count several successes in 2024. After many years of hard work, several teams brought their films to the screen with critical acclaim. The Brink of Dreams premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and received l’Oeil d’Or for Best Documentary. This stunning film, a coming-of-age portrait of girls at the crossroads of their lives, refutes traditional gender roles and proposes a different way to thrive.
Queendom premiered at SXSW in Austin, Texas, toured the world in 2024, while Rising up at night and The Night Smells of Gunpowder both world premiered at the Berlinale this year. Each film pushes boundaries in its own unique way—through form, through story, through production design, and all have the same commonality—new perspectives, bold cinema, complex worldview meant to broaden perspectives.
Equally astounding for its direct storytelling and strong collective voice, No Other Land finally premiered at the Berlinale in 2024, winning both the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. The film captures the lives and resistance of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta that must deal daily with the violence and destruction of the Israeli army. The film has since toured widely—shown at countless festivals worldwide—and winning audience awards around the world, including at IDFA, and ultimately winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Yet the reality behind the camera persists: The filmmakers behind this wonderful film are now under great duress, facing intimidation and arrests, and Masafer Yatta remains in danger.
This feels like a catalyst moment. The world an increasingly hostile place, with political instability and violence on the brink, on a global scale. The toll on the lives, livelihoods, and hopes of this international community is unmistakable.
More than ever, the IDFA Bertha Fund understands its unique stake in the ecosystem of financing, support, and solidarity. Filmmakers need independent, non-recoupable grants that allow them to allocate resources according to their priorities without restriction. They need ongoing, adaptive support that can respond to creative, industry, and legal needs to safeguard their production and work. They need unflinching solidary efforts, that shows up not only in funding, but in sustained connection: a listening ear, a helping hand, an open line of communication, especially while teams get to their finish lines under increasingly difficult circumstances.
This global community—and our team—believes deeply in the urgent importance of stories and reflections on what is happening around us in bridging the divide in society, between peoples and nations. More importantly, perhaps, is the unbridled creativity and narrative sovereignty that we strive to protect—the very essence of freedom and independence.
Looking back at the history of the IDFA Bertha Fund, so many remarkable documentary films come to mind—images and emotions that have bound a community together. Year after year, these films were realized by ever-persistent filmmakers who overcame social, political, and financial challenges to bring their vision to audiences. Over 25 years of collaborations, 96 films completed, and an entire ecosystem built around a flourishing community. In the midst of all this, a new leadership of the Fund has been ushered in—one that will carry forward the safeguarding of this vital mandate.
Looking ahead, the future presents many obstacles, but one thing is certain: Despite the political, financial, and social pressures, filmmakers will continue to step up and persist in telling bold, necessary stories. We will be there to meet them, and to accompany them, the best way we can along the way, and to keep pushing forward—together.
— Selin Murat, incoming Executive Director
& Isabel Arrate Fernandez, outgoing 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
