Category: BEST DOCUMENTARY – 2025 ARFF AMSTERDAM

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Dogs and War in Ukraine

Director’s Name:AKANE YAMADA

Writer’s Name: AKANE YAMADA

Producer: TAKASHI SHINOMIYA

Country of Origin: Japan

Country of Filming : Japan, Poland, Ukraine

Language: English, Japanese, Polish, Ukrainian

Runtime: 1 hour 49 minutes

Film Description:

In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
One month later, director Akane Yamada traveled to the country.
Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Yamada has focused her work on documenting the lives of animals in disaster zones, including the 20-kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
At the border with Poland, she witnessed animal welfare organizations from around the world mobilizing to help refugees and their pets.
Even during wartime, some Ukrainians continued to adopt dogs and cats from shelters—animals who, in turn, provided comfort to hearts wounded by war.
Meanwhile, in Borodianka, near Kyiv, a large number of dogs were found dead.
Shocked by the horrifying footage, Yamada spent three years investigating the tragedy to uncover the truth.
In June 2023, she met the women who had rescued dogs from the Borodianka shelter.
Through them, she identified the person in charge and discovered that the shelter had been abandoned during the Russian occupation.
During her reporting, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed, flooding the Kherson region.
Yamada traveled with a Ukrainian animal rescue team to document efforts to save abandoned animals—dogs and cats left behind—while Russian forces loomed on the opposite bank of the river.
She continued following those who risk their lives to save animals in the most dangerous frontline areas.
In July 2024, she rushed to a children’s hospital in Kyiv that had just been struck by a missile attack.
Through the stories of people who refuse to abandon animals even amid the devastation of war, this documentary portrays the resilience and dignity of those who refuse to surrender to violence.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Following In The Footsteps of My Ancestors – dir.

Director’s Name: Ute Koehler, Katherin Wermke

Writer’s Name: Ute Koehler

Producer: Ute Koehler, Katherin Wermke

Country of Origin: Germany

Country of Filming : Austria, Germany, Poland, Ukraine

Language: German, Polish

Runtime: 60 minutes 6 seconds

Film Description:

“Following in the Footsteps of My Ancestors” is a personal documentary film by Ute Köhler about her family history. The filmmaker embarks on an extraordinary journey to retrace the emigration route of her ancestors, who emigrated from southern Germany to Galicia (present-day Poland) in the 18th century and later to Volhynia (Ukraine).
The film begins with Ute Köhler’s own hike from Dolgesheim to Ulm in southern Germany, followed by a bicycle tour along the Danube to Vienna (Austria). This is the same route taken by her ancestors from five generations back, 240 years ago. Through interviews with witnesses such as her great-uncle Ludwig Zimmermann, who was born in Volhynia in 1902, as well as conversations with historians and archivists in Poland, the moving emigration story of German colonists unfolds.
The documentary shows how her ancestors lived as farmers in German colonies, for example in Hohenbach and Reichsheim in the Vistula triangle in Galicia and later near the city of Lutsk in Volhynia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, until they were forced to flee again during World War I. Ludwig Zimmermann’s family was deported to the Russian interior in 1915 and returned to Germany in 1918. The film combines personal investigation with historical analysis and culminates in Ute Köhler’s decision to process this family history into a novel, a literary tribute to her courageous ancestors.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: UNDENIABLE EVIDENCE: “Clean Medicine. Dirty Politics.”

Director’s Name: John Salcedo

Writer’s Name: John Salcedo

Producer: John Salcedo, Paul G Harch, M.D., Juliette Lucarini-Harch, R.N., Michael F.X. Daley,

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 30 minutes

Film Description:

Across four nations, veteran suicides outpace combat deaths 4-to-1. Dr. Harch’s hyperbaric neurological discovery becomes the target of a global conspiracy to protect medical profits over human lives.

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: Velintonia 3

Director’s Name: Javier Vila Galarza

Writer’s Name: Javier Vila Galarza, Leticia Salvago Soto

Producer: Virginia Moriche Tirado, José Antonio Hergueta

Country of Origin: Spain

Country of Filming : Spain

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 1 hour 41 minutes 49 seconds

Film Description:

A chimera. A symbol. A creative refuge in dark times. An oasis of freedom. The literature of the 20th century silenced between its decadence and abandonment. Velintonia, the house at number 3, cries out to return to what it was. Let the poets return.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Bill W Conscious Contact

Director’s Name: Kevin Hanlon

Writer’s Name: Jay Stinnett

Producer: Kevin Hanlon, Jay Stinnett

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 58 minutes 17 seconds

Film Description:

Conscious Contact explores the personal spiritual quest of Bill W and his thirst for transcendence.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: NORITA

Director’s Name: Jayson McNamara, Andrea Tortonese

Writer’s Name: Jayson McNamara, Andrea Tortonese

Producer: Sarah Schoellkopf, Jayson McNamara, Melissa Daniels, Francisco Villa

Country of Origin: Argentina, United States

Country of Filming : Argentina

Language: English, Spanish

Runtime: 1 hour 28 minutes

Film Description:

A mother’s search for her son accelerates the defeat of a dictatorship and inspires a new global generation of women fighting for their freedoms.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: SAVING JONES

Director’s Name: Rebecca Marie Corry

Writer’s Name: Rebecca Marie Corry

Producer: Rebecca Marie Corry

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes

Film Description:

Saving JONES is a biographical social commentary about the abuse and discrimination of dogs as it directly relates to human abuse. Rebecca Corry is an actress, writer and comedian who has dedicated her life to educating, advocating and saving the lives of pit bull type dogs who are the most abused, discriminated against and murdered dogs on earth. Saving Jones is hilarious and heartwarming yet tragic and inspiring. A truthful look at the real reason she does what she does and why what happening to inherently good dogs is everyone’s problem and direct reflection of a broken society. All profits made from this film will go directly to the Stand Up For Pits Foundation, Inc which is a recognized 501c3 national charity dedicated to educating, advocating and saving the lives of pit bull “type” dogs.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: The Snake and The Whale

Director’s Name: John Carlos Frey

Writer’s Name: John Carlos Frey

Producer: Scott Levy

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming : United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes

Film Description:

Over the past fifty years, four federal dams impounding the Lower Snake River in Washington State have been identified as the root cause for the demise of all of Idaho’s anadromous fish. “The Snake and the Whale” reveals the corrupt deals behind the dams’ construction and the subsequent campaigns to hide their role in this ongoing ecological disaster. Additionally, the dams have profoundly impacted a group of Killer Whales off the coast of Washington, known as the Southern Resident Orca, which rely on Snake River salmon as a primary food supply. These majestic creatures are now atop the Endangered Species list.

(Finalist)

Original Film Title: Léo Major: One Man Army

Director’s Name: Jeremy Pollock

Writer’s Name: Jeremy Pollock

Producer: Colin Curwen

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming : Canada

Language: Dutch, English, French

Runtime: 15 minutes 55 seconds

Film Description:

Canadian soldier single handedly liberates an entire occupied city in the Netherlands overnight

(Honorable Mention)

Original Film Title: SING MY SONG

Director’s Name: Barbara K. Lee

Writer’s Name: Barbara K. Lee

Producer: Barbara K. Lee

Country of Origin: Canada

Country of Filming : Canada, Hong Kong, United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 28 minutes

Film Description:

SING MY SONG documents an aspiring songwriter, Kayee Lee, and her personal journey to find a singer for her songs. Her quest begins with attempts to meet Kelly Clarkson in hopes of the American Idol winner to sing her songs, but she must soon confront her own internalized racism ingrained from the lack of Asian rockstars while growing up in the West.

Lee pursues her recurring dream to keep working on her music while meeting current Asian American and Asian Canadian singer-songwriters along the way, all trying to “break” into the evolving music industry, now that the gatekeepers are losing their stranglehold on who gets to be heard and who doesn’t. All of this happens under the backdrop of a world that is waking up to racial inequities and the marginalization of communities of colour. Lee examines the Model Minority Myth and how it has been used to promote Asians to excel in classical music, but simultaneously creates barriers of not being “cool” enough to participate in popular mainstream music. At times a mediation on the Asian communities’ complicity while other times a frustrated indictment of the erasure of Asian musicians and rockstars in North America, these issues are brought to the forefront as Lee navigates a rapidly changing political and social landscape through the experiences of the Asian-American/Canadian musicians that she meets and the rise of anti-Asian racism.

Ultimately, they inform and inspire Lee on her own personal relationship with her music and how she finds a place to fit in while providing audiences a glimpse of what it is like to be an invisible visible artist in popular music, an industry that should be colour blind.