BIFED – Bozcaada International Festival of Ecological Documentary continues to reject the festival circuit’s obsession with novelty, favouring films that speak plainly about lived realities rather than treating the Global South as an aesthetic resource. The festival prioritises truth (Alethea) over premiere status or production year, building an independent platform where works confronting ecological crisis, exploitation, and resilience can circulate with care. The aim is modest and radical at once: a smaller, more local, and more genuine gathering that nurtures hope while staying consistent about the world’s problems and riches.
The 2025 edition frames its program as «An Invitation to Healing.» Its curatorial note invokes Fatima—a Palestinian girl who sang the song she wanted played at her own funeral before she was killed—alongside testimonies of bonded labour in Pakistan and the persistence of caste oppression in India. The festival asks audiences not to look away, insisting on a space where we can see what we have refused to see and listen for the song we have not yet heard.
International Competition
Selections foreground Indigenous sovereignty, environmental time, and extractive frontiers. Highlights include The Falling Sky (Eryk Rocha, Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha), Yintah (Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell), Geographies of Solitude (Jacquelyn Mills), and new 2025 titles such as Lace Relations (Anette Baldauf et al.), The Coriolis Effect (Petr Lom), Shifting Baselines (Julien Élie), The Cycle (Bulut Renas Kaçan), and Only on Earth (Robin Petré). Short and mid-length works widen the lens, from Iraq’s Beneath Which Rivers Flow (Ali Yahya) to Turkey’s Tomato, Pepper, Depression (Aybüke Avcı).
Naci Güçhan Student Film Award
Emerging voices span Lebanon (The Tree of Hell, Raed Zeno), Poland (Bloodline, Wojciech Węglarz), Turkey (The Visit, Ceren Bulut; Write My Name, Begüm Aksoy; Beyond Suez: The Changing Mediterranean, Kenan Verbakel), Portugal (Iron Crust, Vasco Barbedo), and more.
Panorama
The Panorama section maps corporate accountability, energy transitions, and local struggle. Selections include Hydrogen – Revolution or Illusion? (Andreas Pichler), Adidas Owns the Reality (Keil Orion Troisi & Igor Vamos), Scars of Growth (Monika Grassl, Linda Osusky), Ceasefire (Jakob Krese), We Live Here (Zhanana Kurmasheva), The Last Straw (Éric Guéret), and Turkish titles such as Muzaffer (Ömer Faruk Çetin) and Seva / Together (Nesime Karateke).
Special Screenings
Special programs bridge generations of political cinema, pairing contemporary shorts like #NOFILTER (Kerem Oral) with Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992), alongside works from Lebanon and Türkiye that trace water, war, and weaving as lifelines. Together, BIFED 2025’s program assembles a cinema of witness oriented toward repair.
Find more information on the BIFED 2025 – HERE
