Opening today, the 28th Encounters South African International Documentary Festival returns to Cape Town and Johannesburg. Running from 4 to 14 June, this year’s edition brings together more than 58 African and international documentaries, alongside screenings, Q&As, panels, masterclasses and industry events. The festival opens with Zipporah Nyaruri’s Truck Mama, an intimate portrait of Evaline, one of Kenya’s few female long-haul truck drivers, whose life on the road becomes a story of motherhood, labour, danger and self-determination. Modern Times Review is also once again working with Durban FilmMart’s young critics initiative, Talent Press, to support coverage of the African film selections in the programme.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

Encounters 2026 sets early Oscar contenders alongside major African premieres

Films

American Doctor

Director: Poh Si Teng

Following three American physicians in and beyond Gaza, 'American Doctor' confronts genocide, media legibility, and the ever-collapsing distance between war and domestic responsibility.

Amílcar

Director: Miguel Eek

Built from original letters, poems, and political writings, Amílcar offers a subjective, meditative portrait of Amílcar Cabral and the fight for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s independence.

Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla Experiment

Director: Andreas Pichler

Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla Experiment may not reveal unknown scandals, but its force lies in connecting Tesla’s safety failures, whistleblower accounts and Musk’s political turn

Tristan Forever

Director: Tobias Nölle, Loran Bonnardot

A piano on a cargo ship opens Tristan Forever, a film about Tristan da Cunha and a doctor’s longing for distance, belonging, and a simpler life.

The 2026 Krakow Film Festival opened yesterday and runs through 7 June, bringing another week of urgent nonfiction cinema, animated work, short films, and industry dialogue to one of Europe’s most vital documentary platforms. Modern Times Review has been a longtime partner of the festival, and this year we are once again following the programme closely, with our critics on the ground in Krakow to report from screenings, conversations, and industry events as they unfold.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

Krakow Film Festival reveals new international titles and visual identity

Krakow Film Festival adds new award for documentary innovation

Interview

«We want to be an event where… valuable, long-lasting creative professional friendships are forged, resulting in extraordinary films»

As KFF Industry returns to Krakow in 2026, Katarzyna Wilk discusses the movement between Polish documentary, international festival circuits, Ukrainian projects, and the long-term relationships that allow films to travel beyond recognition alone.

Films

Around Paradise

Director: Yulia Lokshina

Conspiracy culture, settler ideology, and capitalist exploitation converge inside a gated Paraguayan enclave.

Shifting Baselines

Director: Julien Elie

The fantasy of interplanetary escape curdles into a black-and-white requiem for a damaged Earth.

Synthetic Sincerity

Director: Marc Issacs

Blending science and cinema, Synthetic Sincerity follows AI researchers and migrants to ask what remains authentic when images and machines blur.

The Winning Generation

Director: Marco De Stefanis

Between father, grandfather and nation, a young dissident tries to transform legacy into action while searching for tenderness inside a history built on sacrifice.

Traces

Director: Alisa Kovalenko, Marysia Nikitiuk

Winner of the Panorama Audience Award at this year's Berlinale, Traces, details the powerful story of women seeking to survive and thrive after being raped and tortured by Russian forces during the war in Ukraine.

Tristan Forever

Director: Tobias Nölle, Loran Bonnardot

A piano on a cargo ship opens Tristan Forever, a film about Tristan da Cunha and a doctor’s longing for distance, belonging, and a simpler life.

I ask myself, why do archives really matter? Old and contemporary archives are all over the place nowadays – used in documentaries, incorporated into artists’ artworks, featured in academic discussions, and, of course, in galleries and museums. But do the archives really matter when it comes to what they were intended to do?

Reasons to use archives can be political and ethical. As I met the famous Greek filmmaker Vouvoula Skoura late one night at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival this spring, in the city where she was born long ago, I discussed her work with her. The festival gave her a retrospective tribute, showing her life as a filmmaker. Her films are like collages, fragmented, artistic, but also using archive material. Poetical films? She took my arm and said that all her films were about war. This, I think, is not evident when you see them, as many are about a particular person with biographic material, and preferably poets.

We all remember what was said after World War II: «Never again». But as I said to Skoura, maybe more now it is «ever again» – her last film, UTOPIA. The Poetics of Borders: Berlin – Nicoisa (2025) expands into landscapes of neutral zones, green lines, walls, checkpoints, and barbed wire. Also seen as urban disasters from war, and how they have to be followed by reconstruction and economic development. Bombed buildings in Libya, and today’s skyscrapers in Berlin, the city was really bombed in World War II. We talk about the now ruined urban Gaza, the same, enormous destruction – witnessed by us all. Then the archives and old photos will document who owned what, what was before, and what to expect from this ‘evidence’.

In this way, archives, as documents of atrocities, have an ethical dimension. The same for another film I saw at Thessaloniki. Alain Resnais’ film Night & Fog (1956) showed the terrible concentration camps of the Second World War.

Somehow different is how Bill Morrison has been creatively using archival material in his films. Earlier industrialised cities and urban peoples’ activities are shown as what was and has passed – but here with the aesthetics of degrading film reels, artistically shown by repeating clips, juxtaposing them, slowing reels – as he showed in his masterclass in Thessaloniki. Like him, Skoura underlined her poetic mode of expression in her masterclass. I would call this their ‘essayistic’ approach, as they use old reels and archives.

Beyond the typical conventional biographical documentaries, it is maybe more natural today to include different interpretations of the facts of the past.

Koura uses a tangential, metaphorical, and immensely associative focus on personalities, places, objects, buildings, and voices as they relate to literary texts. Her poetic mode of expression is rooted in painting, audiovisual art, and transfigured photography. She draws inspiration from writers such as Edel Adnan, James Joyce, and Antonin Artaud. Or dramas like Medea or plays of Bertolt Brecht.

Koura also knows what it means to be an exile. She is multilingual – speaking English, French, Greek, Arabic and German. So again, here comes the archival topic of diary-like personal notes, from her cross-fertilisation of travel literature. She and others document people fleeing war into exile (as in her Exile trilogy). Reflections on migration, human wandering and displacement – as well as the umbilical cord between memory and journey. In a book on the archive published at the festival, she is described as follows: «She wanted to signify the epic magnitudes of a historic period marked by global conflict and unsparing catastrophe, political utopias, and the struggle against fascism.»

Interpretation

Well, just think, what actual situation could such an approach be applied to today? Israel, Russia/Ukraine, and the US – as we speak. People displaced by war. What memories or old photos mean for them, for their identities, when their homes are destroyed, and their past is hard to get back to?

Archives and cinematic images have a ‘double vision’ – both of what we look at, but also what ‘looks’ at us. Memories require the power of interpretation and judgement. When you use old film material from a concentration or extermination camp – like Renoir did – we must interpret what we see, as it is nearly inconceivable.

And we do not see everything, because since the newsreels appeared (1910–), they have also been used as biased propaganda by those in power. State archives, lists, and documents of people, as in the old East Germany and in ‘Stasi’ organisations today (NSA, etc.), are used for surveillance and control, replaced by selections by digital algorithms today. And the way we look at information stored from yesterday or years back, we can now access billions of web pages on the internet.

It is hard to see how interpretations can be truthful when images, texts, and sounds float all around us in an abundance never seen before, and are just expanding. These enormous ‘archives’ at your fingertips are no longer quality-checked by serious editors, as before, although some still try to maintain the truthfulness or importance of what is communicated.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote about what happens when truth and falsehood can no longer be distinguished. With fake news, obvious lies and manipulated facts on Truth Social from a well-known president (or the narcissistic kid), it is hard for the majority to know what to believe. Although it is evident that the archives of the paedophiles, now in The Epstein files, show what happened. But when in February did they compromise approximately six million pages? The Archive on the assassination of John F. Kennedy contains roughly the same (the last one declassified a year ago, and 40,000 books have been written …). Who can get to the bottom of such? So, as Arendt wrote, when you can no longer distinguish between true and false, you stop believing in the real world. With the consequence of being easily manipulated, with powers doing whatever they want, with no respect for what history has taught us or the International Law anymore.

Still, old and contemporary archives can be used to oppose power and disclose power. For example, what a filmmaker like Harun Farocki or the contemporary Johan Grimonprez [see interview] has done. Here, archives are seen not as ‘objective’ facts, but as a means of revealing hidden traces and treating trauma.

When filmmakers like Koury or Grimonprez (dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997 or Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, 2024) repurpose archival footage (newsreels, diaries, found footage), they engage in exactly the processes Derrida described: re-consignation, reinterpretation, exclusion, and the creation of new ‘impressions’. This ‘archive effect’ in documentaries – that jolt of authenticity mixed with unease – echoes the feverish tension between preservation and destruction, nostalgia and violence.

Venice Art Biennale

Two months after Thessaloniki, at the Venice Art Biennale now, artists in several pavilions again use archives. In the Spanish pavilion, thousands of postcards are glued to the walls by Oriol Vilnova – postcards he assembled over 20 years, as he says, «acting as an archive of the remains of a shared imagination». One wall was filled with only Venice postcards. A huge collection of travelling humans happy on their holidays – a practice that has nearly disappeared with sms and social media.

Several of the 99 pavilions are developing their artwork from memories – and fractures. At the German Pavilion, two women deal with the past: Henrike Naumann’s The German Reunification, which explores German reunification, and Sung Tieu’s Sung Tieu, which explores post-Cold War migration and globalisation. And the Chinese pavilion on their millennial past and contemporary, taking shape in a constant flow of images, memories and visions – from calligraphy to digital, from painting to gaming – a crossover between culture and technology.

The Arab Emirates Pavilion uses sound as space and self-expression to reveal a multilayered culture, while the Kazakhstani Pavilion creates an archive of silence, comprising memories, cultural legacies, and fractures of the post-Soviet context. And let me add that the Indian Pavilion analyses what we call ‘home’ not as a physical space but as a deposit of relations, images and signs that even persist after its loss. Like the artist Sumakshi Singh, who ‘documented’ her grandma’s house in New Delhi before its demolition, as the intensive processes of urbanisation, diaspora and impossible returns.

A lot of memories. Palestinians were also a huge topic, as ‘archives’ of 75 years of suppression are now increasingly evident, topping up with Gaza. In Venice, there were large demonstrations in the streets around the Biennale, as people protested the presence of an Israeli pavilion. «No Artwashing Genocide» was one of the banners. But again, the police couldn’t keep away, running into the masses, with their black gear and blue helmets against peaceful protesters of the ongoing genocide.

Archiveology’ and aesthetisation

Let me end here with some theory, as the word ‘Archiveology’ has been used by some. Regarding film or video practice, the concept refers to the use of the archive as a language. But also the study of archives, as the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have done: Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995).

The book Archive Fever meditates on remembrance, religion, time, and technology. It suggests that archives are never closed or complete – they are haunted by what they exclude, and by the future. In our digital age, the fever intensifies with accessible storage, but with greater risks of an overload and loss of context. Derrida refers to Freud about this feverish, compulsive, repetitive desire to return to the origin, to preserve and consign (gather and deposit) traces of the past in an archive (or photo album) – while simultaneously being haunted by the fear of loss, forgetting, or destruction. It has become a desire to archive everything.

The book Archive Fever has been hugely influential in cultural studies, digital humanities, archival science, and discussions of memory in film, documentary and video art.

‘Conceptual’ curators have long favoured archives, such as at Documenta in Kassel – one with the most obsessively favoured archival art since 1997 (and 2002, 2012).

The point is that the archive, unfortunately, also gets aestheticised as only an object of observation. Make up your own opinion in Venice – if you go there. Do the videos and films of the misuse of power really matter, given how often we see atrocities? Today, «ever again» is the new normal.

«My films are all about wars», said Vouvoula Skoura. The question for new filmmakers and artists today is maybe how to really be heard in the chaos – remember, as Marshall McLuhan said, we live in the global village and are numbed down by all the images.

Is it about what is true or false, but maybe more now about being overwhelmingly numbed down? Will truthfulness and caring love only happen by some minorities of humanists, some festival goers, and those few left who protest and demonstrate, as in Venice, who are still able to really interpret and distinguish things of value?

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

Chile will return to Cannes Docs in 2026 through a new regional format, joining Colombia for the inaugural Docs-in-Progress Chile & Colombia Showcase at the Marché du Film on Monday, 18 March, 2026. The showcase will take place during the Cannes market, running from 12 to 20 May, and will present four Latin American non-fiction projects at an advanced stage of development, two from each country.

For Chile, the initiative continues a sustained presence at Cannes Docs. In 2024, Chiledoc led a delegation of 18 Chilean documentary producers and presented four projects in the Docs-in-Progress Showcase, while its 2022 participation included Malqueridas, which would later become one of the country’s key recent international documentary successes. The 2026 edition marks a shift in scale and strategy, as Chiledoc and Proimágenes Colombia combine their national platforms into a shared showcase intended to strengthen Latin American visibility through collaboration.

The Chilean projects selected are Burning Daddy and The Boy Girl and the Gothik Whale. Burning Daddy, directed by Tana Gilbert, is a Chile, Germany and Spain co-production produced by Paola Castillo, Dirk Manthey, Carolina Astudillo and Wendy Espinal. Gilbert and Castillo previously participated in Cannes Docs in 2022 with Malqueridas, which won the Alpha Panda Award and later received three major awards at the 2023 Venice International Critics’ Week. Her second feature follows Camila and her family as they reconstruct the figure of her father, a charismatic con man, through photographs, legal records and memories fractured by violence.

The second Chilean title, The Boy Girl and the Gothik Whale, is directed by Sidka Saavedra and produced by Constanza Schmidt, Sidka Saavedra and Claudia León as a Chile-Argentina co-production. The project arrives at Cannes after IDFAcademy in 2025 and selection at the FICGuadalajara Docu Lab. Set within Buenos Aires’ underground drag scene, the film follows Orka Gótika while Saavedra’s own journey leads him toward discovering his identity as a trans man.

Colombia’s presence in the showcase is led by Chilapa’s Girl and Antipodal Dreams. Directed by Juana Lotero and produced by Anahí Farfán, Daniel Sánchez and Lotero, Chilapa’s Girl follows Yulieth, a rebellious young woman growing up in a border territory marked by natural beauty, machismo, early motherhood and inherited cycles of violence. Antipodal Dreams, directed and produced by Juanita Onzaga, is described by the filmmaker as her first docufiction feature. Centred on a young Colombian dancer carrying the death of her brother during a silenced historical uprising, the film moves through embodied memory, dreams and collective creation before opening toward Thailand as an antipodal site of ritual and mourning. According to Carlos Moreno, Head of Promotion at Proimágenes Colombia, both projects are distinguished by the strength of their auteur vision and their attention to visual and sound construction.

Cannes Docs has become a key platform for the international visibility of Chilean and Colombian documentary, connecting filmmakers with festivals, sales agents, distributors and exhibitors. The 2026 showcase also underlines a broader regional ambition, presenting documentary as part of a Latin American field increasingly defined by auteur perspectives, hybrid forms, queer self-representation, archival intimacy, and political imagination.

DOK.fest München opens today with its 41st edition, bringing 106 documentaries from 49 countries to cinemas across Munich and online audiences across Germany. Running under the motto «Eyes Wide Open,» the 2026 festival arrives at a moment when documentary culture feels both urgent and unsettled, caught between political witness, technological anxiety and the changing economics of nonfiction cinema.

This year’s programme includes 22 world premieres, 9 international premieres and 51 German premieres, with thematic sections spanning ecological crisis, labour, migration, feminist histories, African perspectives, political resistance and the future of work. Opening with Regina Schilling’s Ingeborg Bachmann – Jemand, der einmal ich war, starring Sandra Hüller, the festival also expands its audience architecture through Signature Films and FocusTalks. Alongside the screenings, DOK.forum will examine AI, digital platforms, financing and the shifting conditions of documentary production today.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

DOK.fest München 2026 unveils full programme for 41st edition

DOK.fest München 2026 opens with Ingeborg Bachmann hybrid portrait

Films

80 Angry Journalists

Director: András Földes, Anna Kis

As political and institutional pressure tightens around Hungary’s largest independent news outlet, the newsroom is pushed, exhausted, into a collective rupture.

A Song Without a Home

Director: Rati Tsiteladze

A trans woman’s life between Georgia and Vienna anchors this striking documentary about repression, survival, and the limits of liberation.

Amílcar

Director: Miguel Eek

Built from original letters, poems, and political writings, Amílcar offers a subjective, meditative portrait of Amílcar Cabral and the fight for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s independence.

Death of Death

Director: Dāvis Sīmanis

A witty and unsettling journey through cryonics, anti-ageing science, and transhumanist fantasy, Death of Death explores the growing pursuit of immortality while exposing the inequality and power that may shape who gets to outlive death.

MARIINKA

Director: Pieter-Jan De Pue

A rare glimpse across the lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine, where brother has been set against brother, and families brutalised by conflict.

Melt

Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Geyrhalter’s latest film observes global snowscapes and people amid tourism and research, documenting the vanishing ice, extreme weather, and urgent climate policy questions.

Nova ‘78

Director: Rodrigo Areias, Aaron Brookner

An electrified archive of 1978’s Nova Convention with Burroughs, Ginsberg, Cage, Smith colliding in a space where theory met punk poetry on 16mm.

Outliving Shakespeare

Director: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan

In a remote Armenian retirement home, the clocks are no longer standing still.

Something Familiar

Director: Rachel Taparjan

A search for a birth family becomes a nuanced meditation on trauma, shared fates, loss, and self-authorship.

The Kartli Kingdom

Director: Tamar Kalandadze, Julien Pebrel

Three generations endure postwar exile in a fractured building above Tbilisi.

Whispers in May

Director: Dongnan Chen

Set in China’s Liangshan Mountains, the hybrid documentary gently draws us into the world of a 14-year-old girl and her two best friends.

At the edge of austerity yet still insistently outward-looking, the 19th edition of One World Romania returns to Bucharest between 24 and 29 April 2026, followed by a month-long online programme accessible across the country. Bringing together over 40 documentary works across multiple venues, the festival continues to position cinema as a site of civic encounter, foregrounding films that engage directly with human rights, political struggle, and social fracture. Since its founding in 2008, One World Romania has evolved into a crucial regional platform where documentary operates as representation and intervention, fostering dialogue, dissent, and collective reflection in a moment when such spaces feel increasingly precarious.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

One World Romania 2026 sets early focus on Johan Grimonprez and Moldovan documentary

Films

American Doctor

Director: Poh Si Teng

Following three American physicians in and beyond Gaza, American Doctor confronts genocide, media legibility, and the ever-collapsing distance between war and domestic responsibility.

Last Letters From My Grandma

Director: Olga Lucovnicova

From Moldova to the southern Urals to Spain, Last Letters from My Grandma links family loss to larger political fractures, asking what peace costs and who pays.

Orwell: 2+2=5

Director: Raoul Peck

The rat cage gone from metaphor to reality: Orwell's dsystopia realised and then some.

Something Familiar

Director: Rachel Taparjan

A search for a birth family becomes a nuanced meditation on trauma, shared fates, loss, and self-authorship.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

Director: Johan Grimonprez

How jazz music played a role in political manoeuvres during the Cold War.

Synthetic Sincerity

Director: Marc Issacs

Blending science and cinema, Synthetic Sincerity follows AI researchers and migrants to ask what remains authentic when images and machines blur.

The Thing To Be Done

Director: Srđan Kovačević

A frontline portrait of cross-border exploitation and quiet solidarity.

From 21–27 April, the goEast Film Festival returns to Wiesbaden as one of Europe’s key platforms for Central and Eastern European cinema. This year’s programme resists clean categorisation, alongside a competition slate foregrounding new regional voices. A dedicated portrait programme honours producer Ada Solomon, tracing the infrastructural force behind Romanian cinema’s global visibility, while newly announced juries reflect the festival’s ongoing investment in critical and transnational dialogue.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• goEast 2026 juries, Georgia focus and EEFFN award revealed

• goEast 2026 unveils Ada Solomon portrait and new competition titles

• goEast 2026 expands documentary focus across competition and shorts

• goEast 2026 targets AI-era image politics with «Strategies of Resistance» programme

• goEast 2026 outlines dates, new director and Revolution-themed programming

Interview

«It was the people and not the authorities»

Ada Solomon on Romanian cinema, documentary, and institutional failure.

Films

Better Go Mad in the Wild

Director: Miro Remo

Rural twin brothers resisting modern life, where imagination, memory, and rebellion shape a fading yet vivid freedom.

Death of Death

Director: Dāvis Sīmanis

A witty and unsettling journey through cryonics, anti-ageing science, and transhumanist fantasy, Death of Death explores the growing pursuit of immortality while exposing the inequality and power that may shape who gets to outlive death.

Flowers of Ukraine

Director: Adelina Borets

On the outskirts of Kyiv, a woman in her 70s demonstrates her love of freedom.

Outliving Shakespeare

Director: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan

In a remote Armenian retirement home, the clocks are no longer standing still.

The Kartli Kingdom

Director: Tamar Kalandadze, Julien Pebrel

Three generations endure postwar exile in a fractured building above Tbilisi.

Every April, Nyon functions as one of documentary cinema’s more exacting barometers. Visions du Réel, in its 57th edition running 17 to 26 April, presents 164 films from 75 countries, with 83 world premieres, reaffirming its role as a key site where nonfiction is exhibited and debated. Laura Poitras opened the edition, while Kelly Reichardt, Sergei Loznitsa, and Meriem Bennani anchor a guest lineup.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

Visions du Réel sets 2026 slate with Cover-Up, The Mastermind, Dao and Melt

Films

American Doctor

Director: Poh Si Teng

Following three American physicians in and beyond Gaza, American Doctor confronts genocide, media legibility, and the ever-collapsing distance between war and domestic responsibility.

Birds of War

Director: Janay Boulos, Abdel Alkader Habak

The unequal power dynamics of global journalism through a love story forged across war, exile, and reporting.

Cover-Up

Director: Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus

Seymour Hersh and the Socratic sting.

Ghost Elephants

Director: Werner Herzog

With Ghost Elephants, Werner Herzog creates another work within his transgressive anthropology.

Melt

Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Geyrhalter’s latest film observes global snowscapes and people amid tourism and research, documenting the vanishing ice, extreme weather, and urgent climate policy questions.

Replica

Director: Chouwa Liang

In Replica, women turn to AI partners for comfort, affirmation, and emotional refuge, exposing the social and psychological conditions that make such attachments possible.

Tristan Forever

Director: Tobias Nölle, Loran Bonnardot

A piano on a cargo ship opens Tristan Forever, a film about Tristan da Cunha and a doctor’s longing for distance, belonging, and a simpler life.

Whispers in May

Director: Dongnan Chen

Set in China's Liangshan Mountains, the hybrid documentary gently draws us into the world of a 14-year-old girl and her two best friends.

March unfolded with the spring festival season in full swing, carrying Modern Times Review across a dense European circuit from Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival to CPH:DOX. Our editorial presence traced the contours of impact filmmaking. As we move into April, the momentum continues with key partnerships at the goEast Film Festival, Visions du Réel, and One World Romania.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• One World Romania 2026 sets early focus on Johan Grimonprez and Moldovan documentary

• East Doc Platform 2026 announces 16 award winners in Prague

• Movies That Matter 2026 crowns Traces and Aisha Can’t Fly Away

• Visions du Réel sets 2026 slate with Cover-Up, The Mastermind, Dao and Melt

• Movies That Matter, NEFTi Launch Short Film Initiative for Displaced Filmmakers

• goEast 2026 unveils Ada Solomon portrait and new competition titles

• CPH:DOX 2026 crowns Whispers in May as DOX:AWARD winner

• One World 2026 announces award winners in Prague

• Iranian composer Atena Eshtiaghi takes Germany’s top documentary film music prize for MATERIA PRIMA

• Krakow Film Festival reveals new international titles and visual identity

• Thessaloniki 2026 awards reveal documentary field shaped by war, memory, and resistance

• FIFDH 2026 unveils winners across documentary, fiction, and series

• DOK.fest München 2026 opens with Ingeborg Bachmann hybrid portrait

• EFP and CPH:DOX renew EUROPE! Docs showcase for U.S. buyers

Interview

«We need a different appreciation of culture in society»

Laurens Korteweg discusses Movies That Matter 2026, financial pressure, Dutch cultural cuts, and the challenge of sustaining a human rights festival.

«No audience is braver than people who come to documentaries»

CPH:DOX Head of Programme Niklas Engstrøm speaks to Modern Times Review about the 2026 festival, democratic dialogue, film curation, and documentary form.

CPH:DOX INTER:ACTIVE 2026: Hypervigilance politics

Mark Atkin discusses CPH:DOX INTER:ACTIVE 2026, the «hypervigilance» theme, embodied storytelling, and the distribution barrier facing immersive art.

Books

The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World

Author: Sandro Mezzadra Brett Neilson

If the West is guilty, does that make its rivals emancipatory? Moving from Iran and Venezuela to Palestine, Ukraine, Cuba, and China, the real conflict is no longer West versus Rest, but between those who rule and those who are ruled.

Films

80 Angry Journalists

Director: András Földes, Anna Kis

As political and institutional pressure tightens around Hungary’s largest independent news outlet, the newsroom is pushed, exhausted, into a collective rupture.

A Song Without a Home

Director: Rati Tsiteladze

A trans woman’s life between Georgia and Vienna anchors this striking CPH:DOX documentary about repression, survival, and the limits of liberation.

Amazomania

Director: Nathan Grossman

The romance of discovery unravels when those once treated as objects of the gaze begin to look back.

American Doctor

Director: Poh Si Teng

Following three American physicians in and beyond Gaza, American Doctor confronts genocide, media legibility, and the ever-collapsing distance between war and domestic responsibility.

Arctic Link

Director: Ian Purnell

The arrival of broadband on remote Alaskan islands unfolds here as a meditation on civilisation itself, in which maritime craft, industrial process, and post-industrial connectivity are woven into a fragile yet far-reaching chain.

Around Paradise

Director: Yulia Lokshina

Conspiracy culture, settler ideology, and capitalist exploitation converge inside a gated Paraguayan enclave.

Birds of War

Director: Janay Boulos, Abdel Alkader Habak

The unequal power dynamics of global journalism through a love story forged across war, exile, and reporting.

Christiania

Director: Karl Friis Forchhammer

A lucid, affectionate portrait of Christiania that moves beyond nostalgia to ask how a utopian community endures after its founding ideals meet everyday reality.

Cutting Through Rocks

Director: Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni

Set in rural Iran yet reaching far beyond it, this is a quietly incendiary portrait of female autonomy under pressure.

Death of Death

Director: Dāvis Sīmanis

A witty and unsettling journey through cryonics, anti-ageing science, and transhumanist fantasy, Death of Death explores the growing pursuit of immortality while exposing the inequality and power that may shape who gets to outlive death.

MARIINKA

Director: Pieter-Jan De Pue

A rare glimpse across the lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine, where brother has been set against brother, and families brutalised by conflict.

Open My Mind

Director: Marcel Wyss

Set against Switzerland’s unusually progressive therapeutic framework, a personal account of psychedelic treatment unfolds as both self-exposure and self-repair.

Replica

Director: Chouwa Liang

In Replica, women turn to AI partners for comfort, affirmation, and emotional refuge, exposing the social and psychological conditions that make such attachments possible.

Sentient

Director: Tony Jones

A troubling and emotionally exposed documentary, revisiting the long history of primate experimentation through the voices of those who carried it out.

Soap Fever

Director: Inka Achté

Memories of an economic crisis, an escapist TV obsession, and timely observations on how cheap entertainment and politics work together, intertwine in this witty, kaleidoscopic collage film of Finland in the 1990s

Something Familiar

Director: Rachel Taparjan

A search for a birth family becomes a nuanced meditation on trauma, shared fates, loss, and self-authorship.

Surviving the Death Committee

Director: Nima Sarvestani

A decades-long pursuit of accountability turns personal grief into political evidence, tracing how survivors, exiles, and chance encounters forced a hidden massacre into public view.

The Voices That Defy the Kremlin

Director: Manon Loizeau, Ekaterina Mamontova

In today’s Russia, even the smallest act of dissent can end in disappearance.

Whispers in May

Director: Dongnan Chen

Set in China's Liangshan Mountains, the hybrid documentary gently draws us into the world of a 14-year-old girl and her two best friends.

Movies that Matter 2026 returns from 20 to 28 March in The Hague, Netherlands, with a strong new edition centred on documentary, human rights, and urgent international political cinema. The festival remains one of Europe’s most important spaces for films that engage with the forces shaping the present. Before we arrive on-site, we take a closer look at the programme, highlight a selection of key titles, and speak with director Laurens Korteweg about the making of an edition under financial pressures.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

Movies that Matter sets a politically charged course for 2026 festival; unveils complete programme

Interview

«We need a different appreciation of culture in society»

Laurens Korteweg discusses Movies That Matter 2026, financial pressure, Dutch cultural cuts, and the challenge of sustaining a human rights festival.

Films

9-Month Contract

Director: Ketevan Vashagashvili

It's not just Georgia where are women trying to find a way out of social misery through surrogacy.

American Doctor

Director: Poh Si Teng

Following three American physicians in and beyond Gaza, American Doctor confronts genocide, media legibility, and the ever-collapsing distance between war and domestic responsibility.

Coexistence, My Ass!

Director: Amber Fares

Noam Shuster Eliassi’s path from UN hopeful to fearless comedian, testing taboos and hope between Jews and Palestinians in Israel.

Cutting Through Rocks

Director: Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni

In a conservative Iranian village, one divorced woman’s political rise sparks fierce resistance, gendered repression, and bold feminist defiance.

MARIINKA

Director: Pieter-Jan De Pue

A rare glimpse across the lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine, where brother has been set against brother, and families brutalised by conflict.

Melt

Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Geyrhalter’s latest observes global snowscapes and people amid tourism and research, documenting vanishing ice, extreme weather, and urgent climate-policy questions.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Silver Lion - Grand Jury Prize at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film follows Hind Rajab’s calls, Red Crescent coordination, and an ambulance denied until it’s shot.

Traces

Director: Alisa Kovalenko, Marysia Nikitiuk

Winner of the Panorama Audience Award at this year's Berlinale, Traces, details the powerful story of women seeking to survive and thrive after being raped and tortured by Russian forces during the war in Ukraine.

As CPH:DOX 2026 opens today and runs through 22 March, Modern Times Review heads back to Copenhagen for one of the key annual meeting points between nonfiction cinema and industry exchange. This year, our coverage will follow the festival across both the public programme and the professional ecosystem, with a particular focus on the DOX:AWARD world premieres, all of which we’ll be reviewing in the days ahead. We will also be on site during the CPH:INDUSTRY days, as the festival’s industry strand gathers filmmakers, producers, funders, and decision-makers from across the field between March 15 and 20.

Alongside our editorial presence, Modern Times Review is also part of Ekko’s international panel of critics for the CPH:DOX 2026 critics grid. Elsewhere, the festival’s wider industry context includes the return of EUROPE! Docs, the EFP and CPH:DOX showcase, highlighting six DOX:AWARD world premieres for the North American market.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• Chile expands its reach at CPH:DOX 2026

• EFP and CPH:DOX renew EUROPE! Docs showcase for U.S. buyers

• CPH:DOX unveils full 2026 programme, citing 86 world premieres

• CPH:DOX announces full programme of 2026 CPH:INDUSTRY activities

• CPH:DOX unveils 2026 competition lineup, adds new FIPRESCI prize

• CPH:DOX expands immersive non-fiction ambitions with INTER:ACTIVE 2026 programme

• CPH:DOX announces 2026 opening film

Interview

CPH:DOX INTER:ACTIVE 2026: Hypervigilance politics

Mark Atkin discusses CPH:DOX INTER:ACTIVE 2026, the «hypervigilance» theme, embodied storytelling, and the distribution barrier facing immersive art.

«No audience is braver than people who come to documentaries»

CPH:DOX Head of Programme Niklas Engstrøm speaks to Modern Times Review about the 2026 festival, democratic dialogue, film curation, and documentary form.

Films

A Little Gray Wolf Will Come

Director: Zhanna Agalakova

Identity politics form the foundation of former high-flying Russian public television correspondent Zhanna Agalakova’s debut documentary.

Amílcar

Director: Miguel Eek

Built from original letters, poems, and political writings, Amílcar offers a subjective, meditative portrait of Amílcar Cabral and the fight for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s independence.

Better Go Mad in the Wild

Director: Miro Remo

Rural twin brothers resisting modern life, where imagination, memory, and rebellion shape a fading yet vivid freedom.

Cinema Kawakeb

Director: Mahmoud Al Massad

Inside a crumbling theatre in Amman, refugees guard reels and memories while century-spanning archives map the road from declarations to today’s Palestine.

Climate in Therapy

Director: Nathan Grossman

A Gestalt-inspired session lets climate scientists grieve, rage, and exhale, revealing systemic neglect and surprising ‘Safe Spaces’ outcome.

Ghost Elephants

Director: Werner Herzog

With Ghost Elephants, Werner Herzog creates another work within his transgressive anthropology.

Nova ‘78

Director: Rodrigo Areias, Aaron Brookner

An electrified archive of 1978’s Nova Convention with Burroughs, Ginsberg, Cage, Smith colliding in a space where theory met punk poetry on 16mm.

The Encampments

Director: Michael T. Workman, Kei Pritsker

From Chicago 7 to Columbia, The Encampments shows how protest is reframed as threat, as language like terrorist and «anti Semite» is used to silence dissent.

Traces

Director: Alisa Kovalenko, Marysia Nikitiuk

Winner of the Panorama Audience Award at this year’s Berlinale, Traces, details the powerful story of women seeking to survive and thrive after being raped and tortured by Russian forces during the war in Ukraine.

February is something of a hinge month for Modern Times Review, the annual point where winter slowness gives way to the documentary industry calendar’s accelerated public life. March, for us, is always busy. We will be around the continent at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, FIFDH, One World Prague, and Movies that Matter, with extensive coverage of CPH:DOX running alongside it all.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• goEast 2026 targets AI-era image politics with «Strategies of Resistance» programme

• Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival unveils full 2026 programme

• Krakow Film Festival adds new award for documentary innovation

• East Doc Platform 2026 full programme announced for Prague

• TIDF (Taiwan) announces competition finalists for 15th edition

• Tampere Film Festival unveils 2026 documentary selections, spotlighting Finnish productions

• Thessaloniki 2026 unveils honourary Golden Alexanders, restorations, and 57 Greek features

• CPH:DOX unveils full 2026 programme, citing 86 world premieres

• CPH:DOX announces full programme of 2026 CPH:INDUSTRY activities

• FIFDH 2026 sets «Resisting Authoritarianism» theme for 24th edition

• CPH:DOX unveils 2026 competition lineup, adds new FIPRESCI prize

• Thessaloniki Documentary Festival sets 2026 tribute to the power of archives

• CPH:DOX expands immersive non-fiction ambitions with INTER:ACTIVE 2026 programme

• FIFDH announces full 2026 Industry Days programme

• BIFED 2026 opens submissions as a call for ecological solidarity

Books

Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown

Author: Wim Carton Andreas Malm

A provocative look at who pays for warming, from migrants in extreme heat to communities in disaster zones, and why billionaire lifestyles matter.

Films

Far From Maine

Director: Roy Cohen

Haunted by the killing of Aseel Asleh in 2000, Arab-Jewish filmmaker and activist Roy Cohen addresses his Palestinian friend in a cinematic letter amid the devastating war in Gaza.

Orlando Pantera

Director: Catarina Alves Costa

Catarina Alves Costa’s portrait of Orlando Pantera avoids the mythology of his death, choosing instead a slow, humane chorus of voices, landscapes, and songs.

Palestine ‘36

Director: Annamarie Jacir

Palestine ’36 revisits the 1936 uprising as the template of the present, tracing Balfour, dispossession, raids, handcuffed kids, and a resistance born in plain sight.

Shards

Director: Sara Broos

From psychiatric waiting rooms to global journeys, Shards assembles fragments of life into a humane meditation on solitude, freedom of imagination, and collective healing.

Synthetic Sincerity

Director: Marc Issacs

Blending science and cinema, Synthetic Sincerity follows AI researchers and migrants to ask what remains authentic when images and machines blur.

The Other Side of the Sun

Director: Tawfik Sabouni

Survivors walk back into the cells that shattered their lives, recounting brutality inside one of Syria’s most feared prisons.

Threads of a Revolution

Director: Ross Domoney, Danny Mitchell

A short but satisfying documentary about the ideas of 1970s US radical Murray Bookchin as realised in Kurdish Syria.

Tristan Forever

Director: Tobias Nölle, Loran Bonnardot

A piano on a cargo ship opens Tristan Forever, a film about Tristan da Cunha and a doctor’s longing for distance, belonging, and a simpler life.

A new year starts, but unfortunately, it seems like the same old world. For MTR, we spent a productive week at the Trieste Film Festival, while also curating film reviews, industry news, and a report on the annual FIFDH filmmaking for social change webinar. Stay tuned for a very busy Spring season with MTR all over the continent, and keep an eye out for our updated brand rollout.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• Docu Rough Cut Boutique opens 2026 call for advanced-edit documentary projects

• goEast 2026 outlines dates, new director and Revolution-themed programming

• CPH:DOX announces 2026 opening film

• Sunny Side of the Doc to take place in 2026 in partnership with Documentary Campus

• Trieste Film Festival 2026 announces full list of winners

• One World CZ launches 2026 trailer, announces first titles, and marks a decade of accessibility

• Doc Alliance taps Armenia’s Golden Apricot Festival as 2026 guest partner

• CPH:DOX unveils 2026 CPH:FORUM project selection

• Thessaloniki 2026 Announces first titles spanning Faithfull, Novak, Welsh, and Brookner restorations

• FIFDH 2026 announces opening and closing films and new media partnerships

Reports

From affect to effect, impact producing as practice at FIFDH Impact Days 2026 webinar

Geneva’s FIFDH 2026 Impact Days webinar explores impact producing for social justice, with insights on turning audience affect into measurable effect through strategy, community accountability, and the right team.

Films

Active Vocabulary
Director: Yulia Lokshina

A Russian teacher flees to Berlin after questioning the war. Her story exposes ritualised school propaganda, then throws an uncomfortable mirror at Western «neutrality» and the new glamour of military service.

An Open Field
Director: Teboho Edkins

Processions, prayer, and stillness frame a community preserving the dead’s memory after a tragedy linked to institutional negligence.

Cover-Up
Director: Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus

‘Cover-Up’ traces the shift from secret policy to reality-making, using Hersh’s career to show how propaganda, access, and fear reshape journalism.

Forget Me Not
Director: Anja Medved

Visual essays that probe memory and denial, arguing that oblivion may comfort the vulnerable but doesn’t avert violence.

Life After
Director: Reid Davenport

A wheelchair-mounted camera meets a chilling reality when Canada’s MAID eligibility rules come into view.

Orwell: 2+2=5
Director: Raoul Peck

The rat cage gone from metaphor to reality: Orwell’s systopia realised and then some.

Outliving Shakespeare
Director: Inna Sahakyan, Ruben Ghazaryan

In a remote Armenian retirement home, the clocks are no longer standing still.

From 16 to 24 January 2026, the Trieste Film Festival returns as Italy’s most vital window onto Central and Eastern European cinema, a nine day survey of premieres, rediscoveries, and the region’s restless present. This year’s 37th edition pairs its celebrated Documentary Competition with broader strands and conversations, with When East Meets West running in parallel. In this newsletter, find our interview with documentary programmer Rada Šešić, alongside reviews across the festival’s nonfiction sections, and we will be on site in Trieste, filing dispatches as the programme unfolds.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

«Wild Roses» brings Slovenian women’s cinema to the 37th Trieste Film Festival

Trieste announces opening/closing films for 2026 festival

Interview

«It’s not about building a slogan or a topic. It’s about building trust between the films»

The Trieste Film Festival is Italy’s key window onto Central and Eastern European cinema, and its 2026 documentary competition arrives as ten Italian premieres shaped by war, migration, labour, and the afterlives of institutions.

Films

9-Month Contract

Director: Ketevan Vashagashvili

It's not just Georgia where are women trying to find a way out of social misery through surrogacy.

Cent’anni

Director: Maja Doroteja Prelog

Love, illness, and resilience on a transformative cycling journey through Italy.

Forget Me Not

Director: Anja Medved

Visual essays that probe memory and denial, arguing that oblivion may comfort the vulnerable but doesn’t avert violence.

In the Penal Colony

Director: Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia, Alberto Diana

Sardinia’s last penal colonies merge inmates, workers, animals, machines, and wind into a lyrical collective cry for freedom.

Landscapes of Resistance

Director: Marta Popivoda

An unorthodox documentary on the exceptional journey of one of Serbia's first female partisans, who helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz.

Militantropos

Director: Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorleva, Simon Moskovyi

From mass graves to choral singing, images traverse Ukraine’s landscapes, questioning identity while war normalises behaviours unimaginable.

The Kartli Kingdom

Director: Tamar Kalandadze, Julien Pebrel

Three generations endure postwar exile in a fractured building above Tbilisi.

The Sky Above Zenica

Director: Nanna Frank Møller, Zlatko Pranjic

A Bosnian town grapples with pollution, health crises, and conflicting interests, as citizens demand accountability from a massive steel plant.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Director: Anna Hints

Female solidarity through Estonian women continuing an age-old tradition.

Trains

Director: Maciej Drygas

IDFA best film award winner Polish director Maciej Drygas's entrancing Trains is a mesmerising journey through much of the 20th century by rail, accompanied by a subtly intense soundtrack.

We Live Here

Director: Zhanana Kurmasheva

A Kazakh family affected by a Soviet-era nuclear test site

A very happy New Year to all who have followed Modern Times Review in 2025. It’s been another long year with hundreds of film and book reviews, essays, interviews, and industry news from across the international documentary landscape. As we look forward to 2026, kicking off our festival partnerships with the 37th Trieste Film Festival, we gather one last month with a collection of our articles from December 2025. You will find our dispatches from Moldova’s Moldox, our interview with the new East Doc Platform Manager, and all the cinepolitical books and nonfiction films of note thismonth,

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• FIFDH Impact Days 2026 launches with webinar on building film campaign teams

• Trieste announces opening/closing films for 2026 festival

• Institute of Documentary Film launches applications for 2026 Short Pitch Programme

• Sunny Side of the Doc to pause in 2026 amid funding and operational pressures

• MajorDocs 2025 announces complete winners of 7th edition

Interview

«Intensity alone doesn’t create value»

East Doc Platform returns to Prague 19–25 March 2026 as Central and Eastern Europe’s key documentary industry meeting point. New manager Hana Kulhánková outlines a sharper, more human approach to matchmaking, time, and creative integrity.

Commentary/Reports

Letters, tomatos, babushkas: Moldovan documentary in the transnational era

From migration to memory to bodily autonomy, six Moldox «Green Vine» films reveal how Moldova’s documentary culture is now defining itself.

Pitch@Moldox: building a documentary pipeline in Chișinău

MOLDOX’s Pitch@Moldox 2025 turns emerging Moldovan docs into European-ready projects, from healthcare breakdown to VHS memory, war-scarred identity and landfill soundscapes.

Films

A Little Gray Wolf Will Come

Director: Zhanna Agalakova

Identity politics form the foundation of former high-flying Russian public television correspondent Zhanna Agalakova's debut documentary.

A Propaganda Film by Betar USA

Director: The Grayzone

Inside Betar USA's campaign of intimidation.

Inside Gaza

Director: Hélène Lam Trong

Rare AFP videos anchor this documentary about Gaza’s vanishing visibility, accusations against reporters, and the breaking of a newsroom under siege.

Last Letters From My Grandma

Director: Olga Lucovnicova

From Moldova to the southern Urals to Spain, Last Letters from My Grandma links family loss to larger political fractures, asking what peace costs and who pays.

Love+War

Director: Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

A first-person, morally unsettled reflection on what it means to document conflict when the storyteller is also part of the machine.

The Encampments

Director: Michael T. Workman, Kei Pritsker

From Chicago 7 to Columbia, The Encampments shows how protest is reframed as a threat, as language like terrorist and «anti-Semite» is used to silence dissent.

The Shipwrecked

Director: Diego Gutierrez

Lives intersect through gardens, conservation, faith, and farming, as myth and landscape frame survival strategies in a country shaped by violence.

Books

If I Must Die

Author: Refaat Alareer

Refaat Alareer’s life under siege in Gaza, his viral poem If I Must Die, and a case for words as resistance when the world refuses to listen.

The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe

Author: Gideon Levy

A Haaretz columnist’s blistering case against permanent war.

Vulture

Author: Phoebe Greenwood

A savage novel punctures the war-correspondent-hero myths, exposing careerism, entitlement, and the fixer who does the real work.

November saw Modern Times Review criss-crossing Verzió, Porto/Post/Doc, Majordocs, and Moldox, chasing films and debates that never stay politely outside the cinema. At Verzió, we also ran the young critics workshop, working with emerging writers to sharpen their arguments and stay attentive to power, form, and context. This monthly newsletter rounds up what we’ve published across the month: book reviews, film reviews, industry news, and interviews, including a conversation with the founder of the Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

• MajorDocs 2025 announces complete winners of 7th edition

• Porto/Post/Doc 2025: The complete winners

• Award winners announced at the 22nd Verzió Human Rights Documentary Film Festival

• Verzió 2025 DocLab professional awards announced

• FIFDH 2026 Impact Lab unveils global lineup

• DOK.fest München 2026 opens submissions for 41st edition

• Chile showcases films, talent, and projects at IDFA

• Ji.hlava 2025: The complete winners

Books

Hostage
Author: Eli Sharabi

Eli Sharabi’s testimony traces war’s exhaustion and a hard truth that everyone is trapped.

Commentary

Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime

by Francesca Borri

On Francesca Albanese’ fifth report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Interviews

«Through cinema and films, she can talk more about her problems and about everything women face»

In Gaza, Dr Ezzalden Shlah stages cinema under a broken truce, where rubble replaces venues and women’s stories refuse to stay buried.

«We are ten years old, but we are still young»

At ten years old, MOLDOX meets Moldova’s EU horizon and the war’s shadow with «Chaos. Reinventing Reality,» testing whether documentary can fortify a fragile public sphere.

Films

Amílcar

Director: Miguel Eek

Built from original letters, poems, and political writings, Amílcar offers a subjective, meditative portrait of Amílcar Cabral and the fight for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde’s independence.

Conbody vs Everybody

Director: Debra Granik

Street skills meet entrepreneurship as a fitness venture builds community, educates clients about life inside, and pushes back against cycles of stigma.

Death of Death

Director: Davis Simanis

An unsentimental tour through longevity gurus, robotic promises, and icy vaults, challenging who benefits when death becomes monetizable by technology.

In the Opinion of the Censor

Director: Andrew Gallimore, Lydia Monin

An eye-opening glimpse into Ireland’s history of cinema censorship, where a 1923 law allowing films to be cut, renamed, and banned according to «the opinion of the censor» remains, with amendments, on the Statute Book.

Melt

Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Geyrhalter’s latest observes global snowscapes and people amid tourism and research, documenting vanishing ice, extreme weather, and urgent climate-policy questions.

Peacemaker

Director: Ivan Ramljak

Witness accounts, banned interviews and shocking street scenes reveal how hatred was engineered and a peace chief silenced as Yugoslavia fractured.

Real

Director: Adele Tulli

A global portrait of digital natives switching personas across Zoom, gaming, and influencer culture, where online connection can feel more lived than offline life.

The Kartli Kingdom

Director: Tamar Kalandadze, Julien Pebrel

Three generations endure postwar exile in a fractured building above Tbilisi.

The Thing to be Done

Director: Srđan Kovačević

A frontline portrait of cross-border exploitation and quiet solidarity.

We Will Dance Again

Director: Yariv Mozer

A tense mosaic of 7 October at Nova told by those who filmed it.

The 10th MOLDOX Festival runs in Chișinău from 26–30 November 2025 under the theme «Chaos. Reinventing Reality,» framing documentary film as both witness to crisis and a tool for imagining alternatives. The programme features 27 feature-length and six short documentaries, mostly premieres, tracing stories from Siberia to Khartoum, India’s red-light districts to Moldova’s depopulated villages, and confronting war, migration, trauma, utopian experiments, and collective healing. Standout titles include The Voice of Hind Rajab and the IDFA-winning Trains. A 2025 innovation is Green Vine, a national competition spotlighting Moldovan filmmakers, with an international jury awarding distribution and development support. Marking the 10th anniversary, MOLDOX adds a Queer Choir concert, public panels, and side events such as concerts, a photo and poster exhibition at Cărturești la Muzeu, parties, and a MOLDOX Bookshelf open through 30 November. MOLDOX Lab returns with workshops and masterclasses for emerging professionals, focused on documentary as social change.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

MOLDOX unveils 2025 programme under «Chaos. Reinventing Reality» theme

Interview

«We are ten years old, but we are still young»

At ten years old, MOLDOX meets Moldova’s EU horizon and the war’s shadow with «Chaos. Reinventing Reality,» testing whether documentary can fortify a fragile public sphere.

Films

Bright Future

Director: Andra MacMasters

The sensory and ideological layers of a forgotten Cold War festival, exploring fleeting solidarity, ideological discord, and the fragility of socialist dreams.

Coexistence, My Ass!

Director: Amber Fares

Noam Shuster Eliassi’s path from UN hopeful to fearless comedian, testing taboos and hope between Jews and Palestinians in Israel.

Cuba & Alaska

Director: Yegor Troyanovsky

Laughing in the face of death, the two heroines of journalist-turned-filmmaker Yegor Troyanovsky’s debut documentary Cuba & Alaska pitch viewers into the agony and ecstasy of Ukraine’s frontlines.

Cutting Through Rocks

Director: Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni

In a conservative Iranian village, one divorced woman’s political rise sparks fierce resistance, gendered repression, and bold feminist defiance.

Flowers of Ukraine

Director: Adelina Borets

On the outskirts of Kyiv, a woman in her 70s demonstrates her love of freedom.

Holding Liat

Director: Brandon Kramer

The horror of the conflict in Gaza for all innocents is underlined.

Khartoum

Director: Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea M. Ahmed, Phil Cox

A mirror to pain, resistance, and hope.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Kaouther Ben Hania’s film follows Hind Rajab’s calls, Red Crescent coordination, and an ambulance denied until it’s shot.

Trains

Director: Maciej Drygas

Polish director Maciej Drygas’s entrancing Trains is a mesmerising journey through much of the 20th century by rail, accompanied by a subtly intense soundtrack.

Building on its announced tribute to French filmmaker Claire Simon, Majordocs frames listening as both an aesthetic principle and an ethical stance. The feature competition presents eight documentaries from eight countries, touching on colonial legacies, identity, mental health, and the social effects of digital life. Industry and public programmes extend the theme through DocSessions and masterclasses, including sessions led by sound designer Philippe Ciompi and a masterclass by filmmaker Ben Rivers. MajorDocs Pitch showcases five new non-fiction projects, while MajorDocs Educa and the Communities initiatives broaden access through student screenings and supported tickets for audiences.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

MajorDocs reveals full lineup for seventh edition, sets sound-focused programme

7th MajorDocs highlights sound, honours Claire Simon

Films

Action Item

Director: Paula Ďurinová

When mental health and political crisis collide, reflection transforms into resistance.

Fiume o Morte!

Director: Igor Bezinović

A crowd-sourced, carnivalesque reconstruction of Rijeka 1919–20, Fiume o Morte! dismantles D’Annunzio’s cult and exposes the roots and afterlives of fascism.

Songs of Slow Burning Earth

Director: Olha Zhurba

Olha Zhurba’s meditative take on the war avoids frontline images to show how the conflict affects ordinary people.

To the West, in Zapata

Director: David Bim

A hypnotic black and white portrait of family life on the margins, where propaganda blares from the radio and love becomes the last reliable safety net.

In 2025, Modern Times Review again joins Porto/Post/Doc. From 20–29 November, Porto hosts 135 films under the theme «The Time of a Journey», with a programme that treats mobility, memory, and class as shared political terrain. Here, we preview films from the International Competition, the new medium-length and short sections, Cinema Falado’s Lusophone dialogues, and spotlights, tracing how the festival’s screenings, talks, and industry strands turn the city into a ten-day school of critical seeing and debate.

Follow Editor-in-Chief Truls Lie on Telegram and Industry Editor Steve Rickinson on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group, Modern Times Review, for an uncensored conversation on all things «Modern Times». And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Bluesky.

News

Porto/Post/Doc 2025 announces full film programme

Porto/Post/Doc 2025 announces opening/closing titles; Cinema Falado foregrounds Lusophone voices

Porto/Post/Doc unveils 2025 theme and dual filmmaker spotlights

Films

Bye Bye Tiberias

Director: Lina Soualem

Four generations of Palestinian women take us on a journey through family, war, memory and identity.

Fiume o Morte!

Director: Igor Bezinović

A crowd-sourced, carnivalesque reconstruction of Rijeka 1919–20, Rijeka or Death! dismantles D’Annunzio’s cult and exposes the roots and afterlives of fascism.

Flophouse America

Director: Monica Strømdahl

Inside one motel room an intimate portrait of American poverty unfolds.

Foragers

Director: Jumana Manna

The petty politics of Palestinian persecution as seen through the lens of age-old traditions of foraging for medicinal herbs.

Little Syria

Director: Reem Karssli, Madalina Rosca

Filmed over 20 years across several countries, a group of Syrian refugees in Berlin fight for justice for Assad-regime victims.

Midnight Traveler

Director: Hassan Fazili

The Fazili family shoots their perilous journey from Afghanistan through the Balkan migration route to an uncertain future on three mobile phones.

Militantropos

Director: Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorleva, Simon Moskovyi

From mass graves to choral singing, images traverse Ukraine’s landscapes, questioning identity while war normalises behaviours unimaginable.

Nova ‘78

Director: Rodrigo Areias, Aaron Brookner

An electrified archive of 1978’s Nova Convention with Burroughs, Ginsberg, Cage, Smith colliding in a space where theory met punk poetry on 16mm.

Only On Earth

Director: Robin Petré

Robin Petré’s cinematically sprawling Only on Earth journeys deep into southern Galicia as wildfires rage on.

Yanuni

Director: Richard Ladkani

The intimate cost of fighting for the Amazon.

Headlining the delegation is Blue Silence (Silencio Azul) by Matías Rojas Ruz, world-premiering in the International Short Film Competition. Set on the coast near Manquemapu, the short revisits the 1965 Janequeo sinking through textured analogue imagery and fragmented memory.

Two Chilean features appear in Signed, IDFA’s showcase for distinctive authorial voices: Ignacio Agüero’s Letters to My Dead Parents (Cartas a mis padres muertos) and Bettina Perut & Iván Osnovikoff’s Invisible Life (Vida Invisible). Agüero’s film threads five decades of family and national history, beginning with his father’s death days after Allende’s election, through archival and new footage in what he calls a «wandering cinema.» Perut and Osnovikoff follow microbiologist-parliamentarian Cristina Dorador into the Atacama, tracing research on drug-resistant «superbugs.»

In Best of Fests, José Jiménez’s Dead Tongue (Lengua Muerta)—co-produced with Sebastián Sánchez—portrays a solitary man on a southern beach, his halting speech circling an unspoken secret tied to the Pinochet era.

Letters to My Dead Parents, a film by Ignacio Agüero

Chilean participation extends to IDFA’s professional platforms. Two filmmakers—Sidka Saavedra Vera and José Jiménez—join IDFAcademy (13–16 November). Saavedra brings the post-production project The Boy Girl and the Gothic Orca (El niño niña y la orka gótika), weaving Buenos Aires’ underground gothic drag scene with a first-person transition narrative. Jiménez attends with EXTERRA (co-directed with Celeste Rojas Mugica), exploring sites and documents linked to Ingrid Olderock, a notorious DINA agent. Ignacio Agüero will also serve on the Envision Competition jury.

Around a dozen Chilean projects at various stages will circulate in IDFA’s market, including:

• Ballover Films: Children: The Memory That Remains (Hijos: la memoria que queda) (Dir. Francisco López Balló; Prod. Francisco López, Lize Bouzidi, Jean Elios) and Territories (Territorios) (Dir. López Balló; Prod. Francia Aranda).

• La Ventana Cine: The Capture (of Paul Schaefer) (La Captura) (Dir. Rafa Valdeavellano; Prod. Carola Fuentes) and I Don’t Want to Say Goodbye (No quiero decir adiós) (Dir. Carola Fuentes; Prod. Rafa Valdeavellano).

• Galgo Storytelling: VR work Knowing Your Nature (Dir. Francisca Silva; Prod. María José Díaz) and feature Chuchu (Dir./Prod. María José Díaz).

• Mimbre Films: No Money No Honey (Dir. Nicole Costa; Prod. Daniela Camino) and Of Water and Death (De agua y muerte) (Dir. Vicente Barros; Prod. Rocío Romero).

• Cangrejo Films: Artifacts of War (Artefactos de Guerra) (Dir. Jorge Caballero; Prod. Ana Giralt, Diego Pino) and Object (Objeto) (Dir. Loreto Quijada; Prod. Fernando Bascuñan, Sebastián Züger, Loreto Quijada), a Chile–Germany co-production.

Chiledoc is a public–private initiative supported by ProChile (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Chilean Documentary Corporation (CCDoc), promoting Chilean documentary worldwide through strategic promotion, network-building and sector development