Docs About Immigration

Bernardo Ruiz reflects on his decades-long career, “humblecore” independent filmmaking, and the first retrospective of his work

Veteran documentarian Min Sook Lee’s TIFF-premiering feature addresses generational silence and trauma

In this interview, Federico Cammarata and Filippo Foscarini discuss their migration-focused Waking Hours and their reasons for filming in darkness

Documentary is proud to debut a clip from Europe’s New Faces, directed by Sam Abbas. The film is an empathetic, unfiltered depiction of both the challenges and triumphs faced by migrants—from the harrowing journey across the Mediterranean sea from Africa to the closely-knit communities they create in the squats of Paris.

Amid the past few decades of Holocaust-focused works, queer artist Kinga Michalska has found a unique approach to “the Holocaust memory documentary” in their native Poland. Their feature-length debut, Bedrock, is a psychological journey through the contemporary sites of former concentration camps and mass graves. It also poses the rhetorical question: What does “never again” really mean? Bedrock premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlinale, where Documentary spoke with Kinga Michalska.

This year, the Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund theme will be: Migration in and to the Americas. While based in the United States, IDA has long

Encountering Sylvain George’s Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023) at the Locarno Film Festival two years ago was a revelation. The three

Largely composed of artful, meditative shots that relish in quotidian minutiae—meal prep, bathtime, daily prayer—Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces is a striking and emphatically humanizing portrait of African migrants residing in a specific Paris squat. Though the film’s 159-minute runtime seems somewhat daunting on its face, the filmmaker’s eye for exquisite detail quickly quiets the viewer’s roving mind. Below, our conversation covers his initial encounter with Parisian squats, how he acquired access to shoot an emergency C-section, and the process of enlisting The Beast and Nocturama director Bertrand Bonello for the score.

Since Pedro and I first started filming unseen in May 2016, I’ve always told him that my main audience for our film is no one else but him. After all, unseen is about his life and his decade-long journey to become a social worker. What makes the pursuit of this goal not so straightforward is the fact that Pedro is blind. If Pedro is truly my main audience, how can I make a film (arguably a primarily visual medium) not only accessible for him but, more so, enjoyable?

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sami Khan ( St. Louis Superman) and immersive producer-sound artist-director Michael Gassert’s POV-premiering (October 3