The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum, a key industry event of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, will showcase a new selection of bold and exciting documentary projects from emerging and established filmmakers. A total of 29 projects from 15 countries will be presented during the Forum, taking place October 28–30, offering their teams the opportunity to connect with potential co-production, financing, sales, and distribution partners.
Eight of this year’s selected projects are directed by first-time filmmakers, alongside new works by acclaimed and experienced directors. These include Lindsey Sitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary filmmaker, Simantini Chakraborty, a close collaborator of Godfrey Reggio and director of The Original Badass, Iranian filmmaker Ali Razi (At Night, the Red Sky), and Polish director Agnieszka Zwiefka (Silent Trees, Vika!), among others.
The selection also features new projects by Emerging Producers alumni Charlotte Heilstone from the United Kingdom and Matej Sotník from Slovakia.
The Forum will present projects from Europe, the United States, and East and Southeast Asia, complemented this year by six upcoming projects from Montenegro, the Country in Focus of Ji.hlava Industry 2026.
“Across the selection, several recurring themes emerge: memory, archives, and what has been suppressed or silenced; individuals confronting systems and structures of power; and the intersection of personal experience with larger historical processes. At the same time, it is precisely the diversity of perspectives, cinematic approaches, cultural contexts, and stages of filmmakers’ careers that makes this year’s selection particularly distinctive,” organisers write.
The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum takes place October 28–30, 2026, and is complemented by an extensive Matchmaking Accelerator, connecting selected projects with international decision-makers and industry professionals.
Around 1,200 industry professionals are expected to attend this year’s jubilee 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum 2026 selections are:
- 6TM Director: Karim Akalay. Producer: Walid Bekhti. Country: Belgium. One scorching summer at the Cité Modèle, Brussels’ largest housing estate, three stories unfold across one family. Two kids chase a magic lamp to keep their wheelchair-using friend from being forced out by broken elevators. A teenage girl builds a team of misfits for a football tournament. A mother rallies her neighbours to uncover who stole the rain. 6TM is a Belgian family comedy in three chapters, rooted in magic realism and the resilience of a community.
- A Spectre is Haunting Europe. Director: Robo MihályProducer: Anna Mach Rumanová. Country: Slovakia, Czech Republic. A socio-political travelogue explores Europe through contemporary crises, historical memory, and political myths known as “European identity.” It examines the tension between ideals of equality and lived realities of exclusion. Moving non-linearly and rhizomatically across places, voices, and situations – from Warsaw to Normandy, Tbilisi, and Lesbos – it portrays a continent in transformation. In this unstable moment, it asks what still shapes Europe today and whether political imagination is still possible, or if we are already at the end of history.
- Alternative Utopia Director: Seungjae OH. Producer: Seunghee OH. Country: South Korea, France, Slovenia. Miguel drifts in technological comfort, a passive subject of modernity convinced of the system’s stability. As the airplane—the Earth itself—fails, the window reveals the suppressed reality: the planet dissolving into ecological firestorms. The fuselage cracks. Impact occurs, but destruction is replaced by a violent suspension of time: Benjamin’s Jetztzeit. In this rupture, Žižek and Löwy emerge, reframing the crash not as an accident, but as the inevitable “storm of progress.” In the stasis, one question remains: can we interrupt the trajectory of collapse before the fall resumes?
- Archiveless Memories for an Imaginary Museum. Director: Ali Razi. Producer: Eliott Baillon, Isabel Machado. Country: France, Portugal, Iran. What if a war never ends ? What if it only waits for another name? In 2025–2026, war returns to Iran. A film begun eight years ago, looking into the unresolved memory of the Iran–Iraq War, is suddenly pulled into the present. The distance between then and now collapses. Nawal, living between France and Iran, has travelled for years with filmmaker Ali—through family landscapes, forgotten places, encounters with those who remember. They were looking for traces of a war. Now the traces are alive again. Memory is no longer behind us. The past enters the present. A war returns—not as history, but as something still unfinished.
- Being in You Director: Michał Stankiewicz. Producer: Martyna Nitkowska, Michał Stankiewicz. Country: Poland. “Being in You” is an XR documentary about Cat Janice, an artist and geologist who died in 2024. The project not only tells her story but allows her to “return” as a generative presence. Instead of the viewer identifying with her, she experiences the world through the viewer. Built from recordings, memories, and archives, her digital ghost becomes a modern ritual of remembrance. It explores whether we can exist after death – in memory, emotion, and technology.
- Catalogue Director: Andrija Mugoša. Producer: Jasmina Karajlović. Country: Montenegro. A struggling filmmaker is running out of money, time and usable footage for his documentary about women sold into marriage from Albania in Montenegro. Convinced that the only way to tell the story is from the inside, he buys a bride himself and films the process. As his project gains support from funders and NGOs, the line between observation and exploitation disappears, forcing him to confront his own role in the system he claims to criticize.
- Daughters of the Pit Director: Anshul Chauhan. Producer: Hyoe Yamamoto, Mina Moteki. Country: Japan. Set on Japan’s remote Ishigaki Island in Okinawa, Daughters of the Pit follows Kaori Uechi, Japan’s first female bullfighting union leader, as she fights to protect her place in the male-dominated world of tōgyū, a centuries-old form of bullfighting. Facing pressure from rival ranchers and union elders to step down, Kaori mentors sisters Hinata (12) and Haruno (8), who raise and train their own bulls despite traditions that exclude girls from the ring. Together, they challenge gender norms and reshape the future of this deeply rooted culture.
- House Made of Mist Director: Alberto Dexeus. Producer: Montse Pujol. Country: Spain. Alberto (29) films his father and two aunts as they empty the family home in Calatayud before selling it. Among the belongings, they find a box of poems in Catalan written by his great-grandparents after the death of Maria Rosa, his grandmother Marta’s sister, killed in the fascist bombing of Lleida in 1937. The discovery leads the family to recover a silenced past. At the same time, Alberto tries to speak with his late grandmother and come out to her. Their journey to Lleida turns private grief into a political act, and into a reflection on memory, archives, and identity.
- If Only the Pines Could Speak Director: Yelyzaveta Myshkalenko. Producer: Diana Nazaruk. Country: Ukraine. A hybrid archival film about the Bykivnia mass graves near Kyiv, uncovered in the 1960s by three Ukrainian artists. Their attempt to reveal the truth about Stalinist crimes was silenced. Decades later, exhumations remain incomplete, and thousands of victims unnamed. Through archives and animation, the film will focus on the exploration of the persistence of political fear, and how silence fuels the cycle of violence. It will question the responsibility and politics of memory on the example of a nearly 100 year-old history.
- Il Genio Director: Ivan Marinovic. Producer: Miljan Vučelić, Ivan Marinović. Country: Montenegro, Italy. IL GENIO is a creative feature-length documentary that explores the life and career of Dejan Savicevic, one of football’s most gifted and unconventional players, as a prism through which broader political, cultural, and economic transformations of Europe are examined. The film traces his rise from Yugoslav football to Silvio Berlusconi’s AC Milan, a transition that coincided with the violent collapse of a country and the transformation of football into a globalized industry.
- Impossible To Ignore Director: Simantini Chakraborty. Producer: Jon Ornoy, Ana Carrizales, Simantini Chakraborty. Country: United States, Canada. Richard Saul Wurman is one of the most influential yet lesser known minds of our time. Brilliant, opinionated and allergic to bullshit, he has spent his life challenging norms and reshaping culture. With exclusive access to his vast archives and interviews with icons, Impossible To Ignore reveals a complex man whose ideas feel urgent in the age of AI. At 91, Richard is still restless, still reinventing himself. His relentless curiosity, outsized ego and audacity fueled groundbreaking ideas that changed how millions understand the world. The world knows his work. It’s time to meet the man.
- Iridescence Director: Dominika Kováčová, Kilhan Wittock. Producer: Matej Sotník, Klára Tasovská. Country: Slovakia, Belgium, Italy. Through the archive of pioneering ophthalmologist Benedetto Strampelli, a mysterious gaze travels across India, Africa and the Amazon, observing people and landscapes while documenting his radical attempts to restore sight. As his images encounter artificial intelligence, dreams, blindness and radically different ways of knowing, the film questions the authority of the image itself. What does it mean to see and what might remain invisible when we believe we can see? A cinematic journey through archives, memory and technology, searching for another way of looking.
- It Still Grows Here Director: Aleksa Bujisic. Producer: Milan Radulovic. Country: Montenegro, Slovenia. It Still Grows Here follows the gardens between the Fond housing blocks and Plečnik Stadium in Ljubljana, a small piece of land that has survived for decades amid housing, a closed stadium and development plans. Through the daily rituals of people who plant, water, repair, teach and preserve its archive, the film portrays a community protecting a living space from oblivion, noise and potential erasure. Combining observation, archive and sound, it explores the right to the city, belonging and shared memory.
- Male Fantasies Director: Max Bowens. Producer: Ryan Krivoshey, Sam Hewison. Country: United States. MALE FANTASIES combines interviews, observational and hybrid scenes, and police bodycam footage from a small, rural, conservative county in Northern Michigan. Part I profiles two former cops and two formerly incarcerated men, examining their relationships to conspiracy, power, and God. Part II follows two groups of men during hunting season, offering a complex portrait of manhood and tradition in the Midwest. The film opens up salient questions regarding the spiritual dimensions of policing, masculinity, and fascism in our contemporary political landscape.
- Monument of Revolution Director: Mladen Ivanovic. Producer: Tamara Puizina. Country: Montenegro, Croatia. The Monument of Revolution built in 1982 on the highest peak of Petrova Gora, is the most imposing of Vojin Bakić’s memorial projects and one of the most significant modernist monuments in Europe. Since Croatian independence, it has been severely damaged by both natural forces and human neglect. While Čedomir Studen, its caretaker, continuously repairs the site, intruders and scrap collectors strip away its material remains. Different groups attempt to define its purpose and ownership, as the monument, abandoned to time, continues to attract attention throgh its physical and symbolic decay.
- Mythos Director: Ondřej Vavrečka. Producer: Tereza Rozálie Koldová. Country: Czech Republic, Moldova. In an age where everyone speaks but few truly listen, Mythos follows exiled filmmaker Artur Aristakisian on his journey from Russia into European exile — a passage that mirrors the search for a voice. As he gives voice to the unseen and unheard, he searches for a forgotten language of empathy and presence. Blending documentary, essayistic, and staged elements into a meditative cinematic structure, the film unfolds in the fragile space between silence, image, and sound.
- Nerva 3177 Director: Matías Boero Lutz. Producer: Sylvie Leray, Blagota Marunović. Country: Spain, Montenegro. Nerva is a peaceful village in Andalusia, located on the banks of the Río Tinto, whose environment and daily life are profoundly altered by the installation of a landfill just a few meters from people’s homes. The town becomes divided between supporters of the landfill and opponents who organize resistance and protest. Years of demonstrations follow, especially when a ship departing from the port of Bijela in Montenegro arrives after traveling 3,177 kms carrying toxic waste…
- Planet A Director: Emelie Mahdavian. Producer: Charlotte Hailstone. Country: United Kingdom. The Doomsday Glacier’s ice shelf is fracturing. A team of scientists, including Naomi, who found solace in nature during a troubled childhood, arrives amid a massive storm to map the collapse they know is coming. Three strands interweave: observational footage of the team drilling cores, deploying radar, and racing to build a monitoring station; Naomi’s journals, tracing the emotional cost of expertise that challenges hope; and The Ice itself, voiced in fractured poetry spanning geologic time. The scientists depart knowing no one will return. The Ice melts on, flooding once familiar landscapes.
- Playtopia Director: Bara Jichova Tyson. Producer: Alice Tabery, Kristina Husová. Country: Czech Republic, Romania, Macedonia, United States. Eight children from different parts of the world enter an endless white space, where they encounter an unfamiliar machine called Playtopia. Playtopia asks them to show it how humans live. Left largely to themselves, they build cities, negotiate rules, argue, play and drift into conversations about home, money, nature, technology, and death. Playtopia observes them, searching for patterns and meaning, while fragments of the children’s self-recorded lives reveal a world far less easily understood. The more Playtopia learns, the more human life seems to exceed what can be observed, measured or explained.
- Rip Current Director: Brent Chesanek. Producer: Brent Chesanek. Country: United States. In New York and Florida, a builder explores landscapes of fabricated history as created by early American writer Washington Irving.
- Searching for Smarter Child Director: Lindsey Sitz, Zan Gillies. Producer: Erin Williams-Weir. Country: United States, Canada. If you were online in 2003, you probably knew SmarterChild. Long before ChatGPT, he was a novelty: a chatbot who was always online. He became a sounding board for a generation, we confided in him, insulted him, and propositioned him. Twenty years later, as AI becomes deeply embedded in our lives, what does our treatment of the first internet chatbot say about us? By revisiting our cringe-worthy conversations, we explore the darkest parts of human nature, accountability, and what it takes to change, not only the technologies we create, but ourselves.
- Sentinels Director: Julia Klein. Producer: Davina Pardo, Claudia Chávez. Country: United States. In 2015, in the Peruvian Andes, Saúl Luciano Lliuya lives in close connection to the glaciers that sustain his community, now rapidly melting and threatening a deadly flood. Determined to act, he brings a landmark case against German energy company RWE, one of Europe’s largest carbon emitters. Filmed over a decade, SENTINELS weaves his legal struggle with intimate family life and his daughter Gleyssi’s growth. The film reflects on climate justice, cultural identity, while asking what it truly means to be a hero in an era of climate crisis.
- She Wrestles Director: Charles Fairbanks. Producer: Lucila Moctezuma. Country: United States. SHE WRESTLES is a portrait of a movement, interweaving multiple character arcs with a chorus drawn from 100+ audio interviews. This vocal chorus represents patterns of shared experience while granting anonymity to wrestlers with sensitive stories, including undocumented and transgender wrestlers. Unforgettable figures emerge: a Native pioneer of girls’ wrestling, the daughter of an incarcerated father, Syrian refugee twins, an asylum-seeker who finds meaning through wrestling. Together, they show how this cultural change is transformative for young women, and a microcosm of the greater world.
- The 13th Fish Director: Sara Stijovic. Producer: Sara Stijovic, Marija Vlahovic. Country: Montenegro. The 13th Fish is a creative documentary exploring the lives of daughters-in-law in Montenegrin society. In a culture where sons bring status and daughters are seen as “a stranger’s supper,” women move through roles whose value shifts with tradition. Through anonymous testimonies and black-and-white imagery, the film reveals voices that speak yet fear being seen. Blending art and sociology, it examines patriarchy’s lasting influence and is the first Montenegrin film to address this subject directly.
- The House Director: Laura Amna Stauth, Francesca Bertin. Producer: Julia Cöllen. Country: Egypt, Germany. Laura returns to Egypt after her mother’s death to sell a decaying family plantation. Isolated from the surrounding village, the estate becomes a space where memory, privilege, and estrangement collide. As friends briefly revive it, buried histories of her mother and grandmother and exploited labor surface. When demolition begins, past and present intertwine, forcing Laura to confront her inheritance and identity before returning to Berlin, carrying its unresolved weight.
- We Did Not Consent Director: Dorothy Allen-Pickard. Producer: Sorcha Bacon, Jules Kirby. Country: United Kingdom. When Jess discovers that her first boyfriend Andy Davey was actually undercover cop Andy Coles, she is forced to confront a devastating truth—she was targeted as part of a state-sanctioned operation to infiltrate activist movements. As she goes public, she learns she is one of at least 60 women deceived by officers who used intimacy as a weapon. We Did Not Consent combines documentary and theatrical storytelling to bring us closer to the women as they revisit their pasts and expose the systemic abuse that sought to silence them.
- We Have the Keys Director: Timo Novotny. Producer: Sebastian Rieker. Country: Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, France. EKTON has the key to anywhere. He leads a secret community climbing cathedrals, surfing freight trains, and partying inside Disneyworld after dark. #Freedomisnotacrime is their creed. No vandalism. Just stolen access. But is this true freedom or life-threatening madness? We follow the masked Gangsta Claus through Europe’s forbidden zones – unsecured steeples, abandoned power plants, and locked amusement parks. Exclusive access to a hidden world. The question: dream or death wish?
- Words We Never Say Director: Agnieszka Zwiefka. Producer: Agnieszka Zwiefka, Iza Igel. Country: Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, Spain. A filmmaker reconnects with her estranged mother whose radical right-wing beliefs drove them apart. As the mother’s eyesight deteriorates, threatening with blindness, they embark on a journey across Europe and the U.S., visiting places and events that shaped their opposing worldviews—from religious gatherings and neo-nazi rallies to feminist protests and the refugee crisis. Through real encounters and staged scenes, they confront political and personal divides, exploring conflict, empathy, and the possibility of understanding before it’s too late.
