Cinepolitical: A Monthly Brief on Documentary

March's Essential Docs & Dialogues

Mar 31, 2025

March 2025 was a month of movement, dialogue, and powerful documentary storytelling with Modern Times Review at some of the most vital festivals across Europe. From CPH:DOX to Thessaloniki, Geneva’s FIFDH, One World (CZ), and Movies that Matter, we featured reviews, reflections, and reports from the heart of these events. Looking ahead, we’ll be on site this April at Wiesbaden’s GoEast and Bucharest’s One World Romania for more coverage where cinema and social consciousness converge.

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News

Editorial

Artificial Intelligence and our mode of thinking

by Truls Lie

What can be said about the flip side of AI—for the environment, workers, and warfare? Several films and discussions at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival delved into reflections on what the future will be like with AI and new warfare.

Films

About a Hero

Director: Piotr Winiewicz

What happens when an algorithm mimics Werner Herzog? A philosophical labyrinth of machine identity and narrative distortion unfolds.

Ancestral Visions of the Future

Director: Lemohang Mosese

Blending docufiction and philosophy, Lemohang Mosese redefines home, exile, and human interconnectedness through Ubuntu and radical decolonial storytelling.

Facing War

Director: Tommy Gulliksen

If this opening film at CPH:DOX was screened 30 years ago, we would have bought this narrative. But now, we have alternative media, independent authors, investigative journalists, Wikileaks and solidarity communities outside the military media research community.

The Helsinki Effect

Director: Arthur Franck

With a gently satirical outer wrapping and a deadly serious inner core, Arthur Franck's account of the seminal Helsinki Agreement of 1975—The Helsinki Effect—demonstrates just how historic a diplomatic process that was at the time seen as tedious and irrelevant really was.

The Propagandist

Director: Luuk Bouwman

The rise and fall of a filmmaker who reshaped Dutch cinema by serving Nazi propaganda during World War II.

The Impossibility

Director: Tomáš Hlaváček

A Kafkaesque portrait of social collapse, systemic injustice, and the racism flourishing in Europe’s hidden housing hellscapes.

The Veto

Director: Tim Slade

Expert insiders reveal tensions and calls for reform at the UN, questioning its future amid great-power politics and veto abuse.

Time to the Target

Director: Vitaly Mansky

Lviv, a city caught between everyday life and an unending funeral procession during war.

Urban Disobedience Toolkit

Director: Vladimír Turner

Exploring the intersections of activism, gentrification, and urban resistance.

Viktor

Director: Olivier Sarbil

A deaf photographer’s inner world redefines war cinema.

We Live Here

Director: Zhanana Kurmasheva

The first Kazakh documentary to screen at CPH:DOX zeroes in on a family affected by a Soviet-era nuclear test site.

You Need This

Director: Ryan Andrej Lough

Unpacking the history of advertising and media manipulation, this film exposes capitalism’s relentless push toward overconsumption, inequality, and planetary destruction

MODERN TIMES REVIEW

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