YIDFF 2025 – report 2: Awards

Previous reports:
YIDFF 2025: preview
report 1: SPI (Sayun Simung)

Yesterday, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival announced the prize winners for this year’s edition. In the International Competition, the main award, the Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (Grand Prize), went to Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, a documentary about the eco-activism of the so-called ZAD (zone à défendre). I haven’t seen the film yet, but I found it fascinating that it received the top award in Yamagata. According to reviews and people I spoke to during the festival, Direct Action devotes much of its time to the group’s everyday life and self-organizing routines — qualities that seem to echo Ogawa Pro’s Heta Village. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

The Mayor’s Prize went to With Hasan in Gaza (2025), directed by Kamal Aljafari, with whom I had the pleasure of having a long and fascinating conversation on my last day at the festival. Some reviewers have described the film as a work of “personal archaeology,” and I couldn’t agree more. Aljafari discovered an old videotape in his camera—footage of himself traveling through Gaza in 2001 with a friend—and decided to turn it into an archival or found-footage documentary. Perhaps less experimental and opaque than his previous work, A Fidai Film (2024), With Hasan in Gaza nonetheless manages to disorient the viewer. As the director explained after one of the screenings in Yamagata, the footage is presented exactly as it was shot, in chronological order, and in its entirety, with nothing edited out—not even the blurred, imperfect, or amateurish images.
According to Aljafari, removing the poorly filmed segments would have been equivalent to erasing the memories of the people and the places filmed —especially when viewed from today’s perspective. That’s why he chose to keep everything. The only editing and intervention, he explained, was limited to the addition of sound and text.

Park by So Yo-Hen won the Denroku Award (Award of Excellence). The documentary follows two Indonesian men conversing under the stars in a park in Tainan. Poems about fellow migrants are read, but soon the film shifts into a more self-reflective mode. Park presents many interesting ideas—as is often the case with works emerging from the Your Bros. Filmmaking Group (see Dorm or Landscape Hunter, for instance)—yet I found it perhaps a bit stretched and meandering.

The other three awards in the International Competition went to Malqueridas (2023) by Tana Gilbert (Flex International Award, Award of Excellence); L’Homme-Vertige: Tales of a City (2024), directed by Malaury Eloi Paisley (Special Mention)—a film I really wanted to see but, unfortunately, couldn’t catch—and Ignacio Agüero’s Letters to My Dead Parents (2025). This was the first film I saw in Yamagata, a documentary composed of old footage of the director’s father and family, interwoven with interviews and images suspended like fragments of a dream to evoke life under the Pinochet regime in Chile. It feels more like a dreamlike patchwork of memories than a linear recollection of the past. Parts of the film are incredibly compelling—the conversation with an elderly union leader recalling his experiences during the military coup is especially powerful.

In the New Asian Currents program, the main prize (Ogawa Shinsuke Prize) was awarded to What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? (2024) by Faraz Fesharaki, which unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to see. The Yamagata Shimbun and YBC Award (Award of Excellence) went to When the Trees Sway, the Heart Stirs (2025) by Lee Jiyoon. The camera moves through Jeongneung Valley in Seoul, an area slated for urban redevelopment where residents are being asked to leave. Elegiac in tone, the film alternates still shots of the neighborhood with conversations with its inhabitants, conveying a striking sense of spatial specificity. As these elements gradually take shape, the work becomes increasingly engaging; in fact, it is one of those rare cases where I felt the documentary could have benefited from a longer running time (it’s only 40′).
In the same program, The Tales of the Tale by Song Cheng-ying and Hu Chin-ya received the Tohoku Denka Kogyo Award (Award of Excellence). It is a beautifully photographed—perhaps a bit too polished?—documentary about an old mine, evoking a ghostly atmosphere by weaving together images of ruins and the memories of miners. In its final minutes, the film reveals that the mine is slated for demolition, and a small group of former workers is opposing it. The relationship between the dead, the living, and the places they inhabit—a theme I mentioned en passant in my previous report—resurfaces here with particular force.

Lastly, the Citizen’s Prize went to Najiba Noori and Rasul (Ali) Noori for their documentary Writing Hawa (2024), which tells the story of a woman who learned to read and write later in life, only to see her dreams shattered by the return of the Taliban regime in 2021.