11th edition CIFF – 9-13 April 2025

A Voetbal Story

Avinash accepts an invitation from his cousin to a casual pickup soccer game that quickly devolves into the most intense game of soccer you’ve ever watched. As the game unfolds, Avinash experiences the challenges and complexities that lie beneath the surface of Miami, grappling with issues of identity, belonging, and ambition.

Bon Bisiña

A self-proclaimed neighborhood spy and meddlesome neighbor, is notorious for prying into everyone’s business. When she learns that she hasn’t been invited to a local wedding, her world spirals into madness and leads to her culminating erratic behavior.

E Último Biahe di Isidel

A touching documentary that delves into the final journey of ‘Isidel I’, a ship that departed Curaçao for Bonaire in 1978 but never reached its destination. Combining interviews and historical perspectives, the documentary encases a compelling narrative with an emotional exploration of this tragic event, capturing the impact it left on the families of the sailors who never returned home. What happened to ‘Isidel I’ and its crew remains a mystery to this day.

Gasoline Riba Kandela

The filmmaker explores an ethical dilemma: should you keep or return stolen money? Two brothers with different lifestyles confront each other.

Hobi

Smooth talking Hobi tries to fix things with his wife, but fails to see that their marriage is already too far gone. It’s his day to take care of their son and on this fateful day he’ll make a choice that will be of huge consequence to his and their lives.

I Can’t Say I’m Sorry

A poignant story of a grown adult woman looking back at her life by having a conversation with her younger self and being confronted with her ‘failures’. This is a beautiful story on how we and those around us set pressure on us, while forgetting the most essential part of life: simply live it.

Kombiná

What is modern Caribbean architecture? This question is central to the new documentary by the Social Design Foundation, in which architect Lyongo Juliana makes an in-depth search for contemporary Caribbean architecture. In the documentary, Lyongo visits various projects that he has designed on the islands over the past 25 years.

Mama

A poetic film about an 18 year old mother who is met with the rejection and embarrassment of her teenage pregnancy. She experiences this from her peers as well as society at large. But the positive solidarity of her own female lineage helps her listen to herself as well as her unborn child.

Mangel

A lyrical exploration unfolds through the eyes of a curious eight-year-old girl, guided bij the nurturing wisdom of her father. Captivated by the enchanting mangroves, playfully called ‘candy trees’, she discovers a new world. However reality emerges.

Mas Ku Palabra

What does it mean to be from Curaçao? Is the Papiamentu language a key to this question? Three people from the island talk about this subject in this documentary where they wonder if identity is ‘mas ku palabra’: more than words.

Memoria Ancestral

A production created to commemorate and reflect on the past, present, and future in connection with Aruba’s not very well known history of slavery. What are the silenced stories in our community, our roots, unjust shames, and ingrained customs? These themes will be brought to the forefront, giving us a safe space to express ourselves vulnerably.

Poder di Awa

Living with the beauty and the power of the sea, as testing as it is threatening. How do people on a small island like Bonaire deal with climate change and the rising of the sea level? A story of love, devotion, perseverance and hope.

Rocco

This film explores a father and daughter relationship within the mindset of a daughter who, at a certain stage in her life, decides to change her way of thinking and living. However, her father’s notion of time and memory become a confrontation within their reality.

Satellite Beach

How can the preservation of cultural heritage and the recycling of plastic waste possibly be intertwined? This film uncovers this unexpected connection, revealing how two seemingly unrelated local movements converge towards a shared purpose.

Sunny

Sunny is a coming of age short film of a boy who we follow in the period before he embarks to study in the Netherlands. We see his friends, his talent for playing the guitar and his jealousy about his cheating girlfriend. He makes an important decision before he leaves.

The Chair

The Chair explores the unexpected confrontation about a chair between a young man returning to church after years away, and a steadfast elder of the Church. Exposing deeper struggles with tradition, belonging, and redemption, an act of reconciliation offers both men a chance to move beyond their differences.

Up The River

Roy takes his Grandpa Benjamin up the river to visit his prodigal brother Hugo. Although Roy knows that Grandpa’s memory is beginning to fail him, it is only in the dugout canoe that he realizes how advanced the dementia has become. When Grandpa tells the story of the indigenous girl Matuwi, who went into the forest to die among her beloved birds, Roy begins to realize that this is no ordinary boat trip up the river.

Veil of Chaos

This director has taken the beautiful landscape of the island and made it a character in this disaster movie of sorts. With a young, yet talented cast of kids, he sets out to tell a simple, yet entertaining story.

Zwarte Ibis

A short afro-surrealistic reverie, a poetic film portraying a young Black woman’s quest for intimacy in a world where the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the political and the personal, the past and the present, become ever blurrier. Through a questioning of historically and culturally imposed views on Black people’s intimate lives in the diaspora.