12/03/2025 - The world premiere of Daan Veldhuizen’s documentary The Promise will open the festival, which includes fiction, documentary and various thematic competitions

Unspooling from 21-29 March in The Hague, Netherlands, the 17th edition of Movies That Matter showcases 98 films with ten world premieres, encompassing fiction features, documentary features and short films eligible for awards in several competitions. The festival will open with the world premiere of Daan Veldhuizen's The Promise, vying for the top prize in the Grand Jury Documentary Competition – the winner of which will qualify for the Academy Awards. The human rights documentary, which uses archival 35 mm footage to interrogate the omnipresent impact of neocolonialism in what was then Dutch New Guinea (today’s Western New Guinea, part of Indonesia), is also jointly part of the festival’s thematic Justice Frame sidebar.

Comprising eight films, the Grand Jury Fiction Competition notably features the world premiere of Morgan Knibbe’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a postcolonial exploration set around different individuals who cross paths in Manila. The rest of the competition is completed by critical and audience favourites from the festival circuit: Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays [+see also:
film review
interview: Scandar Copti
film profile], Neo Sora's Happyend, Lotfi Achour's Red Path [+see also:
film review
film profile], Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Directors Talks @ European …
interview: Mohammad Rasoulof
film profile], Emanuel Pârvu's Three Kilometres to the End of the World [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Emanuel Pârvu
film profile], Milad Tangshir's Anywhere Anytime [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Milad Tangshir
film profile] and Marianna Brennand's Manas [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marianna Brennand
film profile].

Outside of the festival’s opening film and one other work, all of the documentaries in the Grand Jury Documentary Competition, which consists of nine films, will be celebrating their Dutch premiere at the festival. Spanning a diverse range of topics, the selection includes Tommy Guliksen's Facing War, focused on Jens Stoltenberg’s leadership of NATO during the ongoing invasion of Ukraine; Léonard Cohen’s colourful animation Flavours of Iraq; David Borenstein and Pasha Talankin’s quietly resistant whistleblower documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin [+see also:
film review
film profile]; and Alisa Kovalenko’s Ukrainian frontlines diary My Dear Théo.

The thematic competitions include the aforementioned Justice Frame sidebar, focused on “the importance of the rule of law and the fight against impunity”; the Activist Lens, featuring documentaries centred on human rights champions; and the Dutch Focus competition. World premieres in the latter strand include Petr Lom’s The Coriolis Effect, Geertjan Lassche’s Ik was een kind and Thomas Stokmans’ Meneer L. Films in these thematic sections are also eligible for prizes within their respective categories, no matter if they overlap with the Grand Jury competitions, meaning that several works have been nominated for and will be considered for more than one prize.

The festival will close with the Dutch premiere of Sissel Morell Dargis’s Danish documentary Balomania [+see also:
film review
film profile], which examines the eponymous phenomenon in Brazil’s favelas, where the construction and competition of (now illegal) hot-air balloons offers a new and unexpected take on the power of art.