Marking its 20th anniversary this edition (March 27–30, 2025), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has established itself as one of the UK’s most boundary-defying festivals for the moving image. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. Many of the featured works explore the body’s mnemonic capacities—how gesture, movement, and touch might commune with history, or reimagine how to engage with the unknowable: Underground, Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, Bounded Intimacy, an Eri Makihara program, and Nightshift.
Festivals
The 23rd edition of CPH:DOX wrapped last month, with record-breaking attendance and satisfied delegates at the festival’s market, but individual events at the industry conference revealed ruptures in the front of documentary unity against political threats. Filmmaker Omar Shargawi issued one of the most visible criticisms, reading a statement contrasting the festival’s support of Ukrainian filmmakers to a lack of “solidarity with the Palestinians” at an industry talk. At the closing ceremony, Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm and Executive Director Katrine Kilgaard said their aim was “pluralism” and “to make room for a multitude of opinions and ideas, including those that challenge our own perspective as a festival.” Documentary reached out to Engstrøm for further comment via email after the festival ended.
Despite the fact that CPH:DOX has emerged as a highly successful and thriving destination for the documentary industry every spring, this year’s event was shrouded by global economic and political turmoil. If previous year’s editions rehashed familiar complaints about financing and distribution woes, this year’s threats were both more urgently physical and existential. American documentary filmmakers looking for life preservers in Europe in the face of the “MAGA-ification of U.S. gatekeepers”—as Variety called it in a festival report—found the consensus in Copenhagen was that it wasn’t going to be easy.
Now a quarter-century old, the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight has developed into one of the most sharply curated showcases for nonfiction film in the United States. In a climate of festivals fixated on acquiring flashy premieres, MoMA’s programmers instead focus on finding the new and recent titles that interest them most to give New York a taste of the international doc scene. This year, many of Doc Fortnight’s picks significantly repurpose existing media to new ends: Eight Postcards From Utopia, B.F. Skinner Plays Himself, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, Give it Back: Stage Theory, Henry Fonda for President, and An Unfinished Film.
Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s industry platform Agora has gained prominence among documentary professionals and become one of the key events in the winter calendar. Documentary Magazine spoke to Vergou and several professionals in attendance to take stock of this year’s market, examining content trends and the current climate for business. When discussing content trends, Vergou focuses on the growing conversation about supporting filmmakers who lack access to national funding due to political reasons or who have been forced to flee their home countries due to persecution. This year, Agora, in collaboration with DOK Leipzig’s DOK Industry, launched the Doc Together initiative to provide practical support.
While SXSW undoubtedly has its share of buzzy (i.e., some combination of the true crime, music, and celebrity genre) documentaries, navigating through the admittedly unwieldy program can also be a fun treasure hunt. In the end, you’re likely to be gifted with at least a handful of inspiring U.S. nonfiction films no one is talking about yet. This latest edition (March 7–15) began with the added bonus of a trio of female-helmed films, all focused in different ways on one virtually off-the-radar topic: motherhood and its intersection with the law: Baby Doe, Arrest the Midwife, and Uvalde Mom.
Although few people outside China have heard of it, the West Lake International Documentary Festival—locally known as IDF, which stands for “I Documentary Fact”—has quickly become the country’s leading documentary festival since its inception in 2017. The 2024 edition of IDF was held on the last weekend of October at the Xiangshan campus of CAA on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the city whose iconic lake inspired the festival’s name. Over the past few years, IDF has made a name for showcasing formally innovative and thematically diverse works from around the world. This dispatch covers: Anĝelo in 1948, Flames, White Snow, Yellow Roses, Blanket Wearer, and The Dream of Super Bridge.
Sundance is a unique crossroads of industry and independence, where you are able to be surprised by films that you didn’t see coming—films that often end up disrupting the film industry’s ideas of marketability, contending for awards and being placed on all sorts of year-end lists, if they’re able to find the right support. As Sundance Film Festival looks to a future away from Park City, looking into questions of location, land, capital, culture, and evolution, I find myself attracted to the films in the 2025 lineup that seek context and answers to these same questions: Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, Seeds, Free Leonard Peltier, and Khartoum.
The lineup of the 2025 Sundance World Documentary section was more expansive in its geopolitical interest than last year’s. This year the dissenting subtext assumed functional pointedness, with each work making a broader statement against hostile governments. The theaters went packed and audiences cheered as the snow-clad Park City lent an otherworldly, almost mythical safe space to the independent makers and their works. Although there is speculation of the festival moving out of state in 2027, it is difficult to imagine a setting more suited to Sundance than Utah. The inconveniences, like the high altitude and the extreme dry weather, somehow added to the charm and made me feel, albeit perversely, like I had earned the right to be an attendee.
Interviews with sales agents, sales news, project announcements, and industry trends at DocSalon panels at the 2025 European Film Market (February 13–19). The 2025 edition of the Berlinale has been one of the coldest in recent memory, with the German capital covered in snow for almost ten days and the thermometer occasionally hitting -10°C. The A-list gathering, which ran from 13–23 February this year, saw a brand-new management team take over the festival direction. The festival’s American director Tricia Tuttle appointed German-French executive Tanja Meissner to head the EFM.