Kees Driessen

Directed by the Canadian trio of Robert Mentov, Dwight Jantzi and Bryan Dickie, the IDFA 2026 opener is an impressive, unapologetically partisan observation of a jungle training camp for new recruits of a People’s Defence Force civilian militia, preparing to fight for the restoration of Myanmar’s democracy. As an opening film, IDFA could hardly have picked a more fitting documentary.

In DOK Leipzig’s opening film, director Ina Borrmann films women who were interviewed anonymously for Maxie Wander’s 1977 GDR bestselling book ‘Guten Morgen, du Schöne.’ Half a century later, they continue their groundbreaking conversation about relationships and sexuality, discussing what has changed – and what hasn’t…

Who are the ‘good girls’? Those who conform to the strict rules of a Polish reformatory, or those who fight the system until they are eighteen and allowed to leave? Ania Winiarska’s documentary (world-premiering in Ji.hlava’s Opus Bonum competition) doesn’t judge or analyse, but remains steadfastly on the side of the girls within this suffocating correctional facility.

Citizen Osama Al-Ashi is an internationally recognised journalist and war photographer in Gaza. He isn’t reckless but he is very courageous, and many times we see him walking towards the tanks, towards the frontline, towards the billowing clouds of smoke, while everyone else is walking or running in the opposite direction. Because that’s his job. And his job is important. Citizen Osama is not an art film. Its style is basic, its storytelling straightforward. But these images have come to us at a very high cost. And we should not look away.

Gara and daughter Nada live on a gorgeous, sparsely populated plateau, which the Montenegrin military is eyeing up as a NATO shooting range. To Hold a Mountain, selected for Sarajevo Documentary Competition, explains their resistance not through arguments, but through the sublime beauty of the landscape. Because to be there, to live on this ancestral mountain, is to experience the most wondrous sense of space.

Mark Cousins continues his winning streak with parts 6 and 7 of his sixteen-hour long series, as he explores the global development of documentary film in the 1970s, with the rise of, among other things, environmentalism, gay rights, feminism and punk. “White western critics hardly noticed, but the message was clear. In the 1970s, cinema was everywhere. Documentary in particular,” Cousins points out.

Five years after the horrific racist murders in the German town of Hanau that made headlines around the world, survivors and relatives are still searching for answers and, above all, recognition as equal members of society. Meanwhile, in Germany, the far right is on the rise, and support for the AfD shows no sign of abating...

Frustrated teenager, talented artist, battered wife. Mehrdad Oskouei’s remotely directed Afghan niece Soraya is all these things, while she tenaciously tries to enter the EU from Iran and Turkey, hoping to reunite with her mother in Austria. In this nuanced and intimate documentary we follow Soraya as she films herself (hence her co-director credit) during her desperate odyssey. Visually, the whole experience is enriched by beautiful, painterly animations which are clearly fantastical, but convincingly integrated into the documentary reality.

Nông Nhật Quang’s debut feature brings us into his family’s turbulent dealings both with his queerness and his sister’s mental health issues. The film embraces the free-flowing and lively vitality of social media aesthetics – but also, unfortunately, some of its questionable ethics. The film won the Special Jury Award of the Société des Hôteliers de la Côte.

Three courageous women explore their sexual longings, and open up to their vulnerabilities. Each is interesting enough to have been the subject of her own documentary (which would have been more desirable). Nevertheless, all three deserve recognition for the courage with which they have welcomed us into their midst. That is strength - and whatever it is they’re looking for, they have already found something within themselves which most of us will probably never possess.