IDFA Announces Forum Awards Winners: Prizes (And €) Go To ‘All Fixed Up,’ ‘Four Comrades, One Echo,’ ‘The Cord,’ ‘Body Count’

International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) announced its coveted Forum Awards today, giving valuable recognition – and a monetary prize – to several documentary projects at various stages of development.

The IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch went to All Fixed Up by Hao Zhou.

“The project has strong visual language,” noted jury members Sona Jo and Thorvald Nilsen, “and also genuine intimacy which push the boundary of documentary cinema.” The project received IDFA Bertha Fund Classic: Production & postproduction support in 2025.

The logline for All Fixed Up reads, “After struggling to “straighten out” their heir, a family pursues a dramatic masquerade that pushes the boundaries of care, identity, and cross-generational understanding.”

The IDFA Forum Award for Best Producers Connection Project was claimed by Four Comrades, One Echo by Kiva Liu.

“This project convinced us with its unique insight, beautiful cinematography and extraordinary bravery,” wrote jury members Lena Nitsch and Ilyas Yourish. “The filmmaker’s auteurship, coupled with a sharp and wonderful sense of humor, also challenges Eurocentric feminist narratives by its very definition, while crafting a story that embodies both resilience and vulnerability. We hope this award will help the filmmaker find the right partners to realize this exciting project.”

The Cord by Nolwenn Hervé took the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut Project. Jurors Riham Ezzaldeen and Asako Fujioka said, “The winning film for Best Rough Cut Project is one we kept coming back to, almost instinctively, describing it as full of soul. It’s raw, deeply engaging, and anchored by a main character who is as soft as she is fierce. The filmmaker captures her with such multidimensional tenderness that you feel invited into her world rather than shown it from afar. Through confident, intimate camera work, we are taken into the life of a woman who, despite the odds stands as a pillar for her community. A woman who carries others while navigating her own storms.

The jurors continued, “This is a film we cannot wait to watch in its full form. A film that deserves to be seen widely, so the world can witness women on the front lines: creating and saving lives, pushing against systems that rarely consider their wellbeing, and doing so with love, vulnerability, and a hand extended to the next person. Congratulations, and thank you for the passion, heart, and honesty you brought to this presentation.”

In the Best Rough Cut Project category, jurors chose another film for a Special Mention, Dreams of the Wild Oaks by Marjan Khosravibaledi. They said the project “promises the telling of a poignant local story with universal emotions” and praised its “outstanding cinematic style.”

Khosravibaledi’s project previously received IDFA Bertha Fund Classic support in 2024.

The IDFA DocLab Forum Award for Best Project went to Body Count by Cris Bringas.

“A pitch or presentation is an essential tool in the development of any new work,” jurors Toby Coffey and Ellen Kuo commented. “Increasingly it needs to communicate the story-world, production process, financial plans, audience demographics, and throughput of the project, to name a few. But, a great presentation will do more than that. In the hands of the right presenter, it will capture the hearts and minds of an audience. We felt that the winners of this prize, employed the very discipline we are all here to master, compelling storytelling, to bring the audience into the world of their characters within the very first minutes of the presentation. Before we knew any of the logistics, the audience had been convinced that the story needed to be told.”

Each Forum award includes a cash prize of €1,500.

The 38^th edition of IDFA runs through this Sunday (Nov. 23) in the Dutch capital.