4 tips for World Refugee Day 2025

Award-winning filmmaker Lidija Zelovic has been portraying her displaced family in the Netherlands since 1993, when they fled war-torn Sarajevo, with self-mockery and in her own unique way. Zelovic's film essay exposes the duality all migrants live with: what is “home”? In the process, she draws attention to social and political developments in the Netherlands that she recognises from her disintegrated native Yugoslavia. The film won both the Dutch Focus Award and the Audience Award at Movies that Matter Festival 2025.

A journey through history and a confrontation with silence. In Tussen wal en schip - Geruisloos Indisch (Between Shore and Ship: Silent Indian), three grandchildren — Jip, Kyron and Benjamin — accompany their Dutch-Indian grandparents back to the place where they first set foot on Dutch soil. With patience, love and curiosity, they encourage conversations about a past that had been kept silent for decades. How does this hushed history influence their identity today?

Refugee Venezuelans speak candidly about their lives in the shadows in Curaçao and Aruba. From a deserted soldier to a bricklayer and from a hospitality entrepreneur to an education specialist. What is it like to live in a legal vacuum, as a victim of exploitation and under the constant threat of deportation?

This film by Flemish filmmaker Matthijs Poppe - not shown at our festival - is about his visit to a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut ten years ago. Here he met Jamal Handawi, whose parents fled to Lebanon during the Nakba. His story formed the basis for Poppe's graduation project Ours Is a Country of Words (2017), and now Jamal is the central character in his first feature-length film: The Jacket.