October has been full-tilt at Modern Times Review, with a busy slate of new film reviews and industry activities spanning festivals, politically charged nonfiction, and focused conversations. Looking ahead to November, you can meet us at Verzio, where our Industry Editor will tutor the Young Critics Workshop; we’ll also be on the ground at Porto/Post/Doc and MajorDocs, and—marking a first for us—at Moldox in Chișinău. Stay tuned to the site and our socials for rolling coverage, Q&As, and festival notes.
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NEWS
Verzió DocPro returns with workshops, industry talks and project showcases
Adriatic Film & TV Awards announce inaugural winners in Tivat
Verzió 2025 Sets November dates and unveils «We Exist Together» theme
UNAFF announces 28th Edition across the Bay Area this October
Porto/Post/Doc 2025 announces opening/closing titles; Cinema Falado foregrounds Lusophone voices
Mnemonica marks 10 years with launch of «living» archive for digital cinema
INTERVIEW
Festival notes on the future and past
We sat down with the old and new festival directors of the Krakow Film Festival to discuss a generational shift, reality and truth, the challenges of online platforms, and why shorts matter.
«Memory resists erasure and disappearance»
Kamal Aljafari on his first and latest film, With Hasan in Gaza.
MIA Market 2025 puts documentary, PSB strategy and policy in the same room
With 100+ projects and new policy rooms, MIA 2025 frames market design as cultural infrastructure for documentary, drama and animation.
In his master class at Makedox, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper exposed how to «write-in-movement», which literally means «cinemato-graphy». He also talked about political cinema and mental ecology. We met him for our in-depth film interview, especially about his last three films.
FILMS
Ain’t No Back to a Merry Go Round
Director: Ilana Trachtman
With a title taken from Langston Hughes’ famous anti-segregation poem of 1942, Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Ilana Trachtman tells the fascinating, little-known story of one of America’s first-ever mixed-race protests against the Jim Crow laws of the US South.
Carrousel
Director: Pascal Messaoudi
In Fos-sur-Mer, food-truck chats, surfers, and a stark tally of asthma and cancer reveal the human cost of industrial comfort.
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.
Habibi Hussein
Director: Alex Bakri
From Jenin to future Gaza rebuilds, one cinema’s reopening becomes parable of aid spectacle, cultural erasure, and sidelined local knowledge.
Memory
Director: Vladlena Sandu
A child’s-eye chronicle of Grozny, migration, and abuse, refracted into lyrical images that soften brutality without forgetting.
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.
RFK: Legacy
Director: Sean Stone
Politics, memory, and media collide as Eisenhower’s warning, Garrison’s theory, and RFK’s appeal meet RFK Jr.’s claims of institutional failure.
The Day Iceland Stood Still
Director: Pamela Hogan
How 90% of Iceland’s women halted a nation in 1975
The Spies Among Us
Director: Jamie Coughlin Silverman, Gabriel Silverman
From training teens as agents to weaponizing psychology, this story exposes the machinery of East German social control and its wounds that still linger.
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