The wind blows wherever it chooses
The spirit at work on IDFA 2025
In his recent speech to film directors Pope Leo XIV quoted cinema legend David W. Griffith: “What the modern movie lacks is beauty, the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” It is this moving wind that comes directly to mind after seeing a selection of documentaries at the IDFA 2025. Many documentaries showed the wind in as many different ways.
We experienced a full blast storm in the part-experimental film We Were Left Alone (Fomos ficando sós) by Adrián Canoura aboard a fishing boat, facing horrific waves and water coming in from the sea and sky. These images are combined with the sound of everything rattling and shifting, all of which makes the wind almost visible: as a malignant power bent on destroying this small boat and its passengers. Father and son battle the waves; they share a fascination for the wide-open horizons and in doing so try to reconnect spiritually after a divided childhood.
In Ivan Boiko’s The Wind Blows Wherever It Wants we encounter this wind again as an enemy. It brings cold and snow to the shepherds and their sheep in a desolate land. There’s almost no hiding from it and sheep and men huddle together. Again, the wide-open spaces give the wind a free reign to show her devastating power. The buildings, rocks and trees where the herd passes through, show years and years of this battering force. Even the faces of the shepherds tell the story of long days in the wind, sun, rain and snow. They know the wind like one knows a person.
This combination of wind and snow comes back in The Kartli Kingdom (Qartlis Tskhovreba), co-directed by Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel, where we see Georgian refugees battling huge snowdrifts on their way to a safe place to hide. After thirty years the Kartli sanatorium slowly becomes their tomb and we notice how even inside the wind, snow and rain start to erode their home. Is there no place to shelter oneself from the storms of life?
In the deeply personal film The Sessions by Belgian director Sien Versteyhe, we see a different side of the wind: it is here, on the wide-open beach that our subject of the documentary—a young student who was raped—finds a place where she can let go of her fears and tears. The talks and therapy she undergoes need time and space to battle the horrific images and feelings she carries inside of her. Along the shorelines the wind pushes against her long enough to give her the courage to scream and let go. When after a long process, the perpetrator walks away unpunished, she finds new air to breathe and shows how walking against the storms has made her stronger.
Even in the moving and sorrowful Paikar by Dawood Hilmandi which won the FIPRESCI award, we see this friendlier side of the wind. Through the beautiful shots of Iran and Afghanistan, the wind brings familiar smells and feelings to a refugee who comes back to seek peace with the director’s harsh father and his fear-filled childhood. The wind is everywhere in Afghanistan and it’s here he finds the most of his answers. But it is also the wind that carries the deadly Covid that separates him again from his father; this time forever.
The Pope continued his quote: ‘Griffiths reference to the wind cannot but remind us of a passage from John’s Gospel. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (3:8). In this regard, dear seasoned and novice filmmakers, I invite you to make cinema an art of the Spirit.’ And it is this notion of cinema as an art of the Spirit that overflows these documentaries. The power of the wind; the power of the Spirit is strong in these heartfelt and mournful movies.
In the stormy seas of the fishing boat, all feelings stay mostly hidden under the surface. We feel the longing of the son to connect, to retrieve something from his childhood. He positions his dad in his bed aboard to see how his life was when he was not at home, when he as a child missed his father. Did his father lie in his bed thinking about him? Missing him? But even more telling is the part the young filmmaker kept in the movie: the part where the father feels for one moment not in front of a camera and tells proudly how his son steered the fishing boat alone during the night.
As the captain knows the sea, you feel how the shepherds almost breathe their environment: the weather, terrain, sheep, dogs and the tremendous nature. The film fills the viewer with awe for man, nature and you can almost feel a great Spirit at work in the cycle of life and changing of the seasons. Man seems so, so small here and his work only a tiny fraction of what is going on in this big, big world. But in their care for these animals, in their working with the sheepdogs and their laughter at the campfire you feel life as it should be: man as part of nature, as part of the workings of this planet.
And the refugees in the slowly crumbling building? They find strength and courage when someone sacrifices their life for them. The spirit of this man flows through them, emboldening them to stand up against injustice. Even if they are just people nobody cared for, blown away by a heavy storm; someone cared enough for them to die for them. Sometimes their spirit seems broken, but they find new ways to go on in their community; in their sharing and caring for each other.
This brokenness and the strength of the human spirit is even more visible in the reliving of the trauma of a rape in The Sessions. The young student struggles, her life is deeply scarred, her sense of self – violently bent. But through the EMDR therapy sessions, we see her find her words to speak of this unspoken, secret misdeed. While her eyes follow the light, she finds hope again to think about a life without the horrendous memories and the haunting feelings of helplessness. She is bent but not yet broken and during the film’s runtime, she rises again, strong enough to withstand the betrayal of the justice system and to continue living. The will to live free from pain is strong and makes her confront her fear.
The refugee son also confronts his fears when he visits his father: fears not only about the violent past but also fears in the present. Will he be able to renew his relationship with his distant and strongly religious father? Will he be able to make him open and talk about his childhood? But deeper than that lies the longing for healing: he wants his father to repent from his brute upbringing and to tell him that he loves him.
This longing for love, for family is stronger than all the fear and hate. And it is the documentaries’ focus on this invisible wind, the Spirit that gives the viewer courage to stand up and choose for those nobody cares for, for those beaten down by trauma, for those looking for justice, for a home, a parent, a loving gesture or simply a silent look. Thanks to this art of the Spirit, we see and feel the wind again.
By Boaz van Luijk
Edited by Savina Petkova
@FIPRESCI 2025