Cinepolitical: A Monthly Brief on Documentary Film
March's essential docs & dialogues
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.
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News
One World Romania 2026 sets early focus on Johan Grimonprez and Moldovan documentary
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
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
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.