September belonged to Riga, where Baltic Sea Docs marked thirty years of the co-production forum with eight partner awards and a look back at its own history. Venice accounts for most of what follows: four of the five films reviewed here and two of the three interviews, in a year when the festival’s non-fiction section carried NAZA, They’re Here, and the last of Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide films.
October takes us to Vilnius for the first time. Inconvenient Films turns twenty, and we will be working with the festival on its anniversary edition, joining a programme that its own audience helped assemble. We also head to Bratislava for One World Slovakia, and then to Ji.hlava, where the thirtieth edition runs into November.
News
Baltic Sea Docs closed its 30th edition in Riga on 13 September with eight partner awards. Two of Us, directed by Jūratė Samulionytė and produced by Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė and Danielė Kunčinaitė, received the ARTE European Talent Development Award, a 10,000-euro grant paired with a first-look deal, and also won the Movies That Matter Award. Twenty-six projects were pitched over two days. The forum began in 1997 on the Danish island of Bornholm and has been based in Riga since 2005.
Ji.hlava announced the programme for its thirtieth edition, running 23 October to 1 November. The anniversary centres on Films That Changed the World, thirteen titles whose effects reached past the cinema into legislation and public understanding, among them Harvest of Shame, Titicut Follies and The Thin Blue Line. Evidence gathered while Errol Morris made the last of those helped reopen proceedings that overturned Randall Dale Adams’s conviction in 1989. A retrospective is devoted to Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Andrea Slováková has assembled Ji.hlava 30: Thinking Through Film from close to a hundred hours of festival archive, premiering in six chapters. Festival director Marek Hovorka framed the edition around how generative tools are affecting the documentary image, arguing that viewers will need to redefine their expectations of documentary truthfulness.
The festival’s New Visions Forum selected 29 projects from 15 countries for 28 to 30 October. Eight come from first-time directors, and six arrive from Montenegro, this year’s Country in Focus. Around 1,200 industry professionals are expected in total.
The Institute of Documentary Film named nine Czech projects for the first edition of Docs Beyond, Audience, Impact & AI. The programme runs from 6 October to 11 December, splitting between an impact producing module led by Khadidja Benouataf and an audience design strand led by Paul Rieth, with all nine teams then working with Dominic Lees on generative AI in documentary practice.
MIA in Rome confirmed 67 titles for its 2026 Official Selection, drawn from 530 submissions across 82 countries, the market’s largest applicant pool to date. It runs 19 to 23 October. Earlier in the month, MIA named its first guests, including Edward Berger and Bad Wolf co-founder Jane Tranter, and set out to reshape its venues, turning Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini into an industry district. The InterContinental Rome Ambasciatori Palace becomes the market’s first space dedicated to documentary.
DOK Leipzig’s new retrospective, Cinema and Struggle: Latin America Between East and West, turns its attention to the prints themselves. Curated by Florian Wüst, it pairs five features with sixteen shorts made between 1958 and 1985. Much of this material survives in Germany because East Berlin’s State Film Archive and West Berlin’s Friends of the German Cinematheque were copying, trading, and storing films their countries of origin were trying to suppress. A DOK Talk on 28 October brings the four partner institutions together on what that Cold War exchange means for preservation practice now.
Inconvenient Films turns twenty, running 5 to 25 October across Vilnius, Kaunas, Panevėžys, Klaipėda and Alytus, in hundreds of libraries and online. The theme Moved By Cinema came from asking the festival’s own audience which films from two decades of screenings had stayed with them the longest. Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning screens in a Lithuanian cinema for the first time.
BIFED returns to Bozcaada for its 13th edition from 7 to 11 October, gathered around accountability as a question of ecological justice. Organisers are candid about the conditions, writing that the year has not been an easy one financially and that the end of significant support may leave the festival in one of the hardest periods of its history.
The innsbruck nature film festival marks 25 years from 7 to 11 October under the motto «we are one». It opens with Bee Wild and presents thirteen awards worth more than 29,000 euros, alongside a six-film retrospective tracing the event back to the early Innsbruck Nature Film Days.
WCSFP convenes in Tallinn from 9 to 12 November with digital media at the heart of the programme. Speakers include Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor alongside Complexly CEO Julie Walsh Smith, whose organisations together generate around 200 million views, streams or downloads a month.
Interviews
Marta Moneva spoke with Mark Cousins about The Story of Documentary Film, sixteen hours long, which showed its 1980s chapters at Karlovy Vary and has since travelled to Telluride. He talked about the three wars he has lived through and why he records his voice-over quietly, so the viewer feels addressed as an individual. Asked about artificial intelligence, he described asking a chatbot for the history of documentary cinema and getting back a summary of a book he wrote thirty years ago.
Hugo Emmerzael met Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller in Venice, where their short They’re Here world-premiered. The film assembles crowdsourced footage, OSINT data visualisations and material shot on the ground into something closer to horror cinema, covering Operation Metro Surge and the ICE occupation of Minneapolis over the winter of 2025-2026. Poitras noted that an agency with a budget above seventy billion dollars was scared out of town by volunteers on bicycles, and declined to file the outcome under hope.
Steve Rickinson spoke with Juliana Moska, who took over the KineDok Czech programme with Walter Nagy in March. She works from the position that a screening for ten people in a small town can carry more weight than one for a thousand, and describes a model that brings films to where communities already are rather than waiting for audiences to arrive. VR films go outdoors for the first time this autumn.
Steve Rickinson also spoke with Gediminas Andriukaitis as Inconvenient Films reaches its twentieth edition. He came to documentary from human rights law rather than cinema, via a first trip to Watch Docs in Poland, and still occasionally wonders whether naming a festival «inconvenient» was wise when approaching private donors. Lithuanian non-fiction has warmed to political subjects over those two decades, having long favoured the poetic portrait that withholds the filmmaker's position. This year's programme was built around measuring what individual films actually do, with a team member responsible for impact activities and focus groups run to find out whether a film moved anyone. On keeping panels open, he notes that a room full of people who agree with each other is like talking to a mirror.
Films
Five reviews, four of them out of Venice.
Nick Holdsworth reviewed Letters from the Silenced Country, Andrei Kutsila’s account of Belarusian political prisoners assembled from prison correspondence, CCTV footage, video shot by KGB officers and animated sequences drawn by a woman arrested at twenty. More than a thousand pro-democracy activists remain in prison.
Melita Zajc wrote on The Legend of the Desert, in which Elisabetta Giannini returns to the Sahrawi camps near Tindouf with her sister Carolina, whose footage from when she was 8 in the 1990s forms the film’s spine. The referendum promised in 1991 never happened, and Giannini films everything from the eye level of the people in front of her.
Hugo Emmerzael also reviewed The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias, Sophie Fiennes and Slavoj Žižek closing a trilogy two decades in the making across 133 minutes and fifteen cinema classics. The governing image comes from The Prestige, where a vanished canary has to be squashed for the trick to work, and Žižek advises looking for the squashed bird whenever someone announces that we are free.
Sonya Vseliubska covered No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman, Halkawt Mustafa’s Venice out-of-competition feature about a Kurdish sniper in a Peshmerga unit who returns for her sister. Mustafa met female Peshmerga fighters while working as a war photographer in 2014 and shot on location in Mosul, taking the spectacle of post-9/11 war cinema and draining its toxicity.
Dieter Wieczorek reviewed Concrete Land, Asmahan Bkerat’s debut feature, eight years in the making, which screened at Locarno’s Semaine de la Critique. It follows a landless Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family outside Amman whose housing application has been stalled for five years, ending with an eviction order and a move toward a concrete housing block.
Commentary
The Institute of Documentary Film turns 25, and marked it with a piece tracing the route from a VHS library catalogued in a spreadsheet at Ji.hlava to Mr. Nobody Against Putin taking the 2026 Academy Award. Founded in Prague in 2001 by Filip Remunda and Andrea Prenghyová with Tereza Horská and Ivana Pauerová Miloševičová, IDF now reports more than 350 documentaries completed with its forum’s support, while KineDok ran 753 screenings in 198 venues across five countries in 2025.
Truls Lie and Sonya Vseliubska spoke the day before NAZA won the Special Jury Prize in Venice. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor filmed twenty-four military and intelligence insiders at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, faces and voices altered, describing the AI target selection system and the civilian death counts calculated for each strike, up to 500. Israel’s culture minister called for the directors’ citizenship to be revoked within days of the premiere. The conversation moves from surveillance and the algorithm to the essay film as testimony, and closes on the distance between governments and the people.
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