LDNDOCS has announced its feature programme for its second edition, taking place from November 20-22 at the Curzon Bloomsbury Cinema, Bertha DocHouse and Garden Cinema. Established in 2025, LDNDOCS is described as “an intimate showcase of cinematic non-fiction held every November in Central London.”
“Our mission is simple: to bring extraordinary stories to the big screen, because we believe the future of cinema is cinema. Our goal is to help the documentary form thrive, building audiences one screening at a time,” organisers continue.
The 2026 showcase will present 14 new, award-winning documentary features from some of the world’s most acclaimed and exciting documentary filmmakers, all of whom will be in London to present their work, including two-time Oscar-winning Barbara Kopple (Union Town), Iranian auteur Mehrada Oskouei (A Fox Under A Pink Moon), Oscar-nominated Sara Dosa (Time & Water), and Emmy-winning Amir Bar-Lev (The Last First: Winter K2) and Stephen Maing (The Great Experiment).
The showcase will open with Neon’s award-winning Once Upon A Time in Harlem, which completes what filmmaker William Greaves called his most important work. The film follows a gathering of the surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance, and remained unfinished for fifty years, until William’s son David revisited the footage following his father’s death. The film was recently nominated for 5 Critics Choice Awards, after screenings at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Toronto.
LDNDOCS will close with Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals For A Revolution, which draws from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, as Ahangarani retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history. The film premiered at Cannes, where it won the L’Œil d’or and was recently announced as the official British entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.
Other notable titles include the Locarno-winning The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, by acclaimed photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti, an intimate portrait of two girls growing up female in rural Argentina shot over 20 years, multi Audience Award-winning American Doctor, Poh Si Teng’s director debut, which follows three American medics who return home from working in hospitals in Gaza as they continue to fight for the patients and colleagues they left behind, and Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman’s Jean-Michel, about the artist Basquiat, which weaves together untold memories from close friends and family and rare archival imagery to tell the story of the iconic artist.
Highlighted screenings from recent festivals include the Sundance-winning Nuisance Bear by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman and Biljana Tuturov’s and Petar Glomazić’s To Hold A Mountain and Andrew Morgan’s TIFF hit and music-driven love story, Bleeding Hearts. LDNDOCS will also host the world premiere of Khosha: The New Land, a powerful story about eight members of Botswana’s Khwe Bushman tribe as they embark on a long journey to find a new homeland.
“2026 has been an incredibly exciting year for documentaries, both in terms of the range of the work and also in how nonfiction films are resonating with audiences, especially within a theatrical setting. This year’s programme highlights that. It is full of bold, ambitious nonfiction films and filmmakers who are continuing to push cinematic nonfiction in new and powerful ways”, said Ben Fowlie, founder of LDNDOCS.
2026 PROGRAMME:
- American Doctor by Poh Si Teng | USA, State of Palestine, Malaysia, Qatar, Denmark | 2026 | 93 min. Three American medics return home from working in hospitals in Gaza, determined to fight for the patients and colleagues they left behind.
- Bleeding Hearts by Andrew Morgan | USA | 2026 | 97 min. A music-driven love story about real-life couple Zella Day and Jesse Woods, two musicians chasing a shared dream while navigating pressures that could spark their breakup—or their breakthrough.
- A Fox Under A Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhalaghi | Iran, France | 2025 | 76 min. Five years, one smartphone, two directors — a long-distance self-portrait of an emigrant’s journey.
- The Great Experiment by Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar | USA | 2025 | 100 min. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT is an epic poem in documentary form – a mirror held to a nation at war with its own reflection, asking not who is right, but whether the experiment itself can survive.
- The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer by Alessandra Sanguinetti | Argentina | 2026 | 96 min. Spanning more than 20 years, this intimate portrait of two girls, their everyday lives, fantasies and dreams explores their realities and inequalities of growing up female in rural Argentina.
- Jean-Michel Basquiat by Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman | USA | 2026 | 95 min. Through untold memories from close friends and family and rare archival imagery, this film demystifies the story of Basquiat and discovers the man behind it all, Jean-Michel.
- Khosha: The New Land by Gakemotho Satau and Zander Booth | Botswana, USA | 2026 | 67 min. Near the beautiful and mysterious Okavango Delta in the heart of Africa, eight members of the Khwe Bushman tribe – descendants of the oldest living human culture – embark on a long journey to find a new homeland.
- The Last First: Winter K2 by Amir Bar-Lev | USA, UK | 2026 | 98 min. A historic race to become the first to summit K2 in winter unravels into tragedy, exposing how ambition, ego, and the pursuit of glory can be as dangerous as the mountain itself.
- Nuisance Bear by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman | USA | 2026 | 90 min. A polar bear is forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as its ancient migration collides with modern life. When a sacred predator is branded a nuisance, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.
- Once Upon A Time in Harlem by David Greaves | USA | 2026 | 100 min. A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves has one last trick up his sleeve with what he considered the most important event he captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
- Rehearsals for a Revolution by Pegah Ahangarani | USA | 2026 | 95 min. Through five portraits of relatives and mentors, five expressions of resistance, Pegah Ahangarani sketches her life story. Drawing from personal archives, home videos, street protests footage, newspapers, and recorded voices, she retraces more than 40 years of Iran’s history.
- To Hold A Mountain by Biljana Tuturov and Petar Glomazić | Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia | 2026 | 82 min. In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family.
- Time and Water by Sara Dosa | USA, Iceland | 2026 | 90 min. Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.
- Union Town by Barbara Kopple | USA | 2025 | 106 min. UNION TOWN completes Barbara Kopple’s trilogy on labor rights following her Oscar-winning HARLAN COUNTY, USA and AMERICAN DREAM, two landmark cinéma vérité documentaries.
The 2026 LDNDOCS showcase will take place November 20-23 at the Curzon Bloomsbury Cinema and Bertha DocHouse in the Brunswick Centre, London WC1N 1AW, and the Garden Cinema. For more information, click www.ldndocs.com.
