The state is supposed to protect its citizens – but what happens when its own institutions surveil them, turn them into commodities or fail to defend them? From the machinery of the Stasi and the human trade conducted by the communist state of Romania to child trafficking on a European scale and the disappearance of an urban forest before the authorities’ eyes, these films reveal how systemic abuse and neglect do not affect everyone equally. Sometimes injustice is not a flaw in the system, but the very way it functions.

A FOREST ONCE STOOD HERE!

Valentin Anghel

Romania · 2026 · 68 min

Did you know that in the coldest city on Earth, crime rates rise as temperatures fall? Similar curiosities and the existential question of whether people have any impact on the apartments, streets, and cities they inhabit haunt filmmakers who employ exciting cinematic viewpoints to explore not the classic documentary topic of human relationships, but the relationship between humans and their environment. We invite you to enter the worlds of “An Awesome Flat,” “The Black Blizzard,” “Total Life Forever,” and “Where the Silence Is Heard” to search for proof that our existence leaves a trace in the spaces we inhabit and find out what it means to belong.

WHERE SILENCE IS HEARD

Gabriela Pena, Picho García

Chile, Spain · 2026 · 94 min

Who else but a sister can face the most bewildering turns in the destiny of their brothers and still see the person beneath their wounds? In these three deeply personal films, sisters turn towards brothers whose lives have been marked by crime, addiction or a brutal act of terror. Cinema becomes a journey towards understanding – sometimes an attempt to help or save (“If pigeons turned to gold”), sometimes a way to grieve (“The golden swan”), and sometimes simply the grace of remaining present without judging even criminals (“From dawn to dawn”).

IF PIGEONS TURNED TO GOLD

Pepa Lubojacki

Czech Republic, Slovakia · 2026 · 110 min

War is not fought only on the front line, nor does it end with a ceasefire. 3 movies show us the everydays of war in Ukraine ,Lebanon and Nagorno-Karabakh, how simple civilian routines are modified to fit it and the creative ways people find to survive during and after unimaginable trauma. “Traces” and “Here elsewhere” show how people lose autonomy over their own bodies: war pushes them over borders, introduces food rations, curfews, and brings upon them violence that marks them for life. And for a bit of romance, in the midst of war - Birds of war brings us into the intimate conversations of two journalists who in the process of reporting on the sirian war, end up falling in love and marrying one another.

HERE, ELSEWHERE

Comes Chahbazian

Belgium · 2026 · 66 min

Learn from documentaries how to change your perspective and experience the world differently! These films do more than offer a new point of view: for a moment, they help you step inside a reality totally unknown to you and rediscover your own world. Discover what the world feels like to someone who is deaf (“Signs from Below”), how animals might see us humans (“Amma, Do Giraffes Cry?”), what it would mean, as an adult, to live in a treehouse (“IMAGO”), and what a series of apartment viewings, performed from a bird’s-eye perspective, can reveal about an entire society (“An Awesome Flat”).

IMAGO

Déni Oumar Pitsaev

France, Belgium · 2025 · 109 min

Most of us encounter social injustice every day, caused by bad policies or by the lack of necessary laws, yet our possibility to change these conditions is quite limited as individuals caught in our daily routines. It is inspiring to see how some people put their lives on hold and choose to take action in the public sphere where systems and politics fail to do so. Among them are an actor who sets out, quite literally, to dismantle the remnants of Soviet ideology in the Republic of Moldova (“Lenin’s Pawn”); a British couple who transform their street into a solar-powered community (“Power Station”); and 80 independent journalists in Hungary who risk unemployment to defend their moral integrity and refuse to spread propaganda (“80 Angry Journalists”).

80 ANGRY JOURNALISTS

András Földes, Anna Kis

Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway · 2026 · 94 min

Although questions of what it means to be a man, and how to raise a boy today, have become increasingly controversed and politically charged, some filmmakers still find fresh ways into the subject, looking beyond ideological battles to its more intimate dimensions. Watch “Confessions of a Swedish Man” for the story of a self-proclaimed feminist and single father who enters an anti-feminist men’s retreat to understand the anger and loneliness behind the men’s rights movement, only for the investigation to turn towards his relationships with his own father and son. Or if you are interested in rarely brought to screen dynamics between men, go for “Unconditional?”,an intimate and sometimes uncomfortable father–son story about a psychiatrist who believes running can heal trauma, yet struggles to accept his own son overweight son.

UNCONDITIONAL?

Frank de Rooij

Netherlands · 2026 · 71 min

These three films offer powerful testimony to how uncovering the detailed history of one’s family of origin can open a path towards healing from transgenerational trauma. By bringing buried histories and inherited wounds to light, the filmmakers begin to understand what had previously seemed inexplicable: the recurrence of harmful patterns of behaviour in “Something Familiar”; addiction in “If Pigeons Turned to Gold”; and the origins of persistent interpersonal difficulties—and possible ways out of them—in “Last Letters from My Grandma.”

LAST LETTERS FROM MY GRANDMA

Olga Lucovnicova

Romania, Moldova, Belgium, Netherlands · 2025 · 94 min

Young people today face more possibilities than any generation before them, yet often have less protection when the paths they choose lead somewhere dangerous. Across these films, Eastern and Western cultures collide within young lives still searching for belonging and purpose: in “From Dawn to Dawn,” a man from Spain’s Chinese immigrant community struggles to build an ordinary life while being repeatedly drawn back into the gang world he entered in his youth; in “The Golden Swan,” a young Norwegian artist travels towards an idealised India, only to be abducted and killed in Kashmir; while the Western-educated filmmakers of “IMAGO” and “Confessions of a Mole” return to their families in the Caucasus and China, where their ideas of adulthood come up against traditional expectations. The three friends of “A Fire There” stand between the inherited life of their Armenian village and imagined futures elsewhere, while “If Pigeons Turned to Gold” follows a sister trying to save her brother who even tough is only 30 years of age, looks way older, given to his drug addiction.

CONFESSIONS OF A MOLE

Mo Tan

China, Poland · 2025 · 92 min

Stories that take us far away, on foot, to the rhythm of hooves, under the force of nature. A body, a few dogs, and a staff protect the flock on which an entire community depends. Pastoralism does not belong only to the past. From the crossing of the Persian mountains in “Grass: A Nation Battle for Life” (1925), to the shepherdess in present-day Montenegro who fights to protect her grazing lands from being turned into a military training ground in “To Hold a Mountain”, a century of cinema has captured both the strength and fragility of this way of life. “On the Road” and “Milky Way”, made nearly thirty years apart, offer an intimate look into the lives of Romanian shepherding families. Between departures and returns, we begin to understand what binds them to this exhausting way of life and what it takes to carry it on. “SweetGrass” immerses us in the pastures of Montana, accompanying shepherds along one of the last journeys to the mountains. “Wool Man Sheep” explores why tons of wool end up as waste and how they might once again become a resource. In the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, these films ask us what future awaits a world whose knowledge and practices might help us rethink the way we produce food and inhabit the land.

TO HOLD A MOUNTAIN

Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić

Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia · 2026 · 105 min

Some of the most difficult struggles of our time are being led by women in spaces usually considerred as male domains. Whether clearing mines by hand in Karabakh (“Steps in silence”), defending Montenegro’s pastoral highlands from a NATO-backed military training ground, (“To hold a mountain”) or confronting tech giants in the name of her country (“Techplomacy”), the women in these films take on battles that shape the future of entire communities.

STEPS IN SILENCE

Fariz Ahmadov

Azerbaijan, Poland · 2026 · 72 min

What is it like to date an AI boyfriend? Trough the story of 3 young women from “Replica,” we can experience how real a virtual romantic relationship can feel. But AI is entering far more than our romantic lives. What happens when we trust an AI therapist to untangle our problems, as in “All That We Say to Each Other”; Or to end up working for an AI boss, as in “How to Talk to Lydia”. And a movie like “Elon Musk Unveiled. The Tesla Experiment” shows us how failures in Tesla’s Autopilot systems—some resulting in fatal crashes—are turned into training data for the vehicles’ artificial intelligence and nobody is held accountable.

REPLICA

Chouwa Liang

Australia, France · 90 min