Venice’s robust nonfiction selection revealed filmmakers grappling with inheritance—of land, literature, trauma, and the weight of documenting lives
Festivals
Diving deep into the Danish doc mainstay’s standout titles Always, The Helsinki Effect, and Nordic competition winner Walls – Akinni Inuk
“Always balance, everything in balance,” intones Raul Niño Zambrano, all smiles and relaxed on the last morning of his fourth year as creative director of Sheffield DocFest. It’s an aspirational mantra for a festival that seeks to elevate the documentary art of drawing meaning from chaos; in a capsizing world that needs independent media more than ever but would rather attack it, a confident and constructive place to rally is vital. Brexit cut off Creative Europe and Creative Media funding and visa-free visits from Europe, the pandemic hammered revenue and audience habits, and the UK remains in a deep industry recession with more than half its freelance workforce out of work and its once-mighty broadcasters on the back foot. And yet the festival has steadied.
Well-regarded as a champion of independent and alternative cinema, South Korea’s second-largest festival proudly tackles the contemporary political
While Karlovy Vary may be best known for its star wattage and warm midsummer embrace of fiction auteurs, this year’s 59th edition (July 4–12) once again made a powerful case for documentary’s enduring vitality. Across the official selection, sidebars, and special screenings, nonfiction titles proved indispensable in reflecting Europe and the region’s evolving identities, eccentricities, and contradictions. This festival dispatch includes reviews of Grand Prix-winner Better Go Mad in the Wild, TrepaNation, Action Item, and Divia.
Since its founding in 1971 in the small town of Giffoni Valle Piana in southern Italy, the Giffoni Film Festival has grown into a global reference point for cinema made for—and with—young people. In this interview for Documentary, Minervini shares insights about his journey as a programmer of GEX:DOX, the distinctive qualities of Giffoni, the challenges and opportunities of curating documentary films for young audiences, and the spirit that animates this dynamic festival section. This interview has been edited.
It’s only us; there’s no them. That’s the provocation at Tribeca’s 2025 Immersive exhibition, titled In Search of Us, mounted in partnership with Onassis ONX and Agog. The exhibit seeks to challenge the act of othering that is so entrenched in media landscapes with “us vs. them” ideologies. About half of the show is comprised of documentary or documentary-adjacent work. This dispatch includes review of four exemplary nonfiction works.
This article is a condensed and slightly adapted version of a talk I delivered on June 8, during the Skjaldborg documentary film festival in Patreksfjörður, Iceland, titled “The Press Playbook: How To Get Your Doc in the Spotlight.” What follows reflects both the structure and tone of that session—direct, personal, and grounded in real-world practice.
It is all too easy to overlook nonfiction film at Cannes, where documentary is, if you go by institutional classification, largely a vehicle for chronicling the history of cinema. This year, the most compelling documentaries were found in the parallel festival showcases. The winner of the Œil d’Or (Golden Eye for the best documentary at Cannes) Imago, from Deni Oumar Pitsaev, was in Critics’ Week. Likewise, ACID had the most formally challenging documentary this year at Cannes, Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and it was Directors’ Fortnight that premiered a Ukraine documentary with stunning and often inventive cinematography, Militantropos, by the Tabor Collective.
Last year, national and international press widely reported on what The Globe and Mail described as “the most tumultuous year in the festival’s history,” complete with sweeping personnel changes, social and financial pressures, and the temporary closure of their flagship Ted Rogers Cinema. Though Hot Docs managed to pull through for its 32nd year with a new executive director (Diana Sanchez, formerly of TIFF) and a replenished staff (some of the programmers, including department head Heather Haynes, returned after their prior exodus), what frightened this hamstrung fixture of Toronto’s flailing film scene was dismally clear. Social issues don’t entirely permeate the programming, nor do their chosen films observe such issues in totality, but Hot Docs has always strived to stay in tune with urgent matters of the present, especially through films that align their audience’s point of view with what will one day be the right side of history.