Cinepolitical: a monthly brief on documentary

Happy New Year & December's Essential Docs & Dialogues

Dec 31, 2025

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

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.