Prophet Town (United States) by Dan Howlett

This is the full and final story of Warren Jeffs, the largest child grooming ring in US history and his devoted followers who took their town back and destroyed his legacy. By weaving the shocking backstory of the Shortcreek community and the ritualistic abuse suffered by nearly all the residents with the forward narrative of the first-ever democratic election in the area we discover what happened to break this community of 10,000 and what is being done to fix it.

What is surprising about the Warren Jeffs story is how little has been covered despite the number of broadcast hours devoted to it. His heinous sex crimes against children have been well documented but the story of the Crick and the systematic abuse of the 10,000 people whose lives he destroyed is still waiting to be told. In America’s heartland there is a functioning theocratic dictatorship where the people are subjected to routine, torturous abuse because of one man’s decisions. Children are married and abused, families are separated and a terrifying doomsday prophesy is preached. Jeffs’ control of political and power structures within the town is absolute because of his control of a religious trust that owns all of the land and property in the area. This gives him the power to send away anybody deemed a threat. If he wants a new wife, he sends her husband away; if a boy is coming of age and there is a shortage of wives they are exiled and forbidden from seeing their families again. He enforces his will by making his followers believe he can see everything they are doing and thinking. This is made believable because of the intricate spy systems he has set up within families. Mothers and wives spy on their husbands and brothers while they spy on them in return. Everybody reports to the Prophet. What was once a community filled with love and affection has become a dystopian nightmare of 1984 proportions which Donia wants to destroy.

 Her electoral campaign provides a forward narrative that has never been featured in an FLDS/Warren Jeffs documentary. We don’t document the crimes of Jeffs in a spurious, sensationalist way, we document the determination and fortitude of a woman fighting against the most entrenched misogynistic social structures in America to take on a powerful prophet, his church and everything she formally held dear.

 We also have an alternative perspective on Donia’s campaign as those who have remained loyal to Jeffs have granted us unprecedented access into their lives. We follow FLDS members Lori Barlow, Norma Richter, Esther Blistline and her daughter Angela as they fight for their town, their beliefs and their homes against the influx of returning apostates like Donia. This documentary feels like the full and final chapter in a century long story of polygamy, prophecy and power. 

Running time: 01:28:27

You're No Indian (United States) by Ryan Flynn

Executive Producers Wes Studi and Tantoo Cardinal share the story of Tribal disenrollment, the process by which an individual loses their right to be a member of a federally recognized tribe, has devasted thousands of Native Americans. The unjust ejection of legitimate tribal members is most prevalent amongst tribes operating casinos on their lands. The feature documentary “You’re No Indian,” produced with the deep collaboration and trust of our subjects, reveals the corruption and greed behind this shocking practice and its destructive impact on individuals, families and Indigenous communities in the United States.

Running time: 01:24:11

The Universe of Me, Brent Everett (Canada) by Francis Luta

Bodies abound in ecstasy when you’re gay porn legend BRENT EVERETT. A muscle god whose boyish good looks have been weathered by time. Documentarians follow him to tell a story about career reinvention, but instead lead down a ten-year path of self destruction.

Running time: 01:45:00

Yalla, Baba! (Belgium, Lebanon, Netherlands, Qatar) by Angie Obeid

Angie (34) takes her father Mansour (74) on a roadtrip from Brussels to Beirut by car in an attempt to retrace the same path he took 42 years ago. However, the route is no longer the same, and neither is their relationship.

Running time: 01:40:00

Bacon’s Histories: Study for a Portrait (Germany, United Kingdom) by Martha Parsey

A motion picture artwork in 8-parts starring Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and Richard Burton, BACONS HISTORIES: Study for a Portrait explores the influence of the Histories on Francis Bacon's painting, from Greek drama and Egyptian sculpture to T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare. The film includes previously unpublished interviews with Francis Bacon recorded and provided by David Sylvester, where Bacon recounts his biography in early 20th century Ireland, England, Berlin and Paris in his own words. The film accompanies Bacon's close friend and interviewer David Sylvester as he hangs the retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and includes the only existing interview with Henrietta Moraes (1931-1999), Bacon's most frequently painted female subject. The film offers a contemporary feminist reading of Bacon and a re-evaluation of Francis Bacon's standing as an openly homosexual artist long before homosexuality was decriminalised in England in '67. Language plays a significant role in the interweaving of these voices, whether in French- a language in which Bacon felt best understood through a lifelong relationship to French culture and French thinkers- or in Greek, a constant echo of the Greek playwrights Bacon so greatly admired , as well as the great English playwrights, Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, brought to us by Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, John Gielgud, Alec Guiness and Richard Burton.

Running time: 00:50:00

Cosmographies (Chile) by Juan Francisco Salazar

Cosmographies is a hybrid film that draws from modes of speculative fiction, observational and poetic documentary, activism, and Indigiqueer approaches. Māori astrobiologist Xuê Noon (played by Australian/Māori artist Victoria Hunt) finds solace in Mars in 2051 as a leader from the Aotearoa Space Agency on an international scientific mission, following the discovery of dormant microorganisms by the NASA Mars Sample Return Mission in 2039. Xuê wanders across this sentient planet and reflects on the newly found lifeforms as she grows plants in a glasshouse. Through the spirit of an ancient taniwha, she slipstreams in spacetime to the Atacama Desert in 2023 where she lived as an Indigenous scientist years earlier. In Atacama the film engages with numerous ongoing life-and-death struggles for land and water justice led by Indigenous communities, activists, and scientists in this old, vital yet scarred desert. Through interviews and conversations, the film depicts centuries old and ongoing forms of social injustice and ecological degradation to weave a critical allegory against the renewed commercial impulse of a new space age rampaging in the 2020’s. Xuê is not returning to Earth. She reads fragments from a diary she has titled Cosmographies. As she contemplates her own death on Mars (becoming stardust) Xuê slipstreams one final time to visit her younger self in Rotorua, Aotearoa, during a cold August night in 2003, when Earth and Mars were at their closest in 60,000 years. The film brings a message urging us to support land and water defenders in the Atacama desert and to rethink the cosmos not as a frontier to conquer, but as a delicate ecology to which our planet is intimately and ancestrally connected

Running time: 01:33:45

Sila (United States) by Zaya Benazzo, Maurizio Benazzo

In Greenland, the word Sila holds everything at once — the weather, the breath, the consciousness connecting all living things. This tender, nonlinear documentary follows Inuit women moving through three hundred years of Danish colonialism: forced baptisms, children sent abroad to be remade, and a systematic medical programme that inserted contraceptive devices into girls as young as thirteen, without consent, without warning, without asking. Their bodies became a site of colonial administration. Their wombs, silenced.

The film journeys into ceremony — the shaman's call home, the heartbeat of the drum, the slow needle-drawn return of ancestral body markings erased within a century of missionary arrival. Visually luminous and spiritually attuned, Sila holds grief and remembering in the same breath: a remembering that travels through bone and nerve and the long line of mothers, all the way back to the first conscious human being. Still there. Still listening.

Running time: 00:60:01

Zaad (Seed) (Belgium) by Dries Meddens

After his mother passed away, Dries discovers his father’s bipolarity. The care this mental illness imposes in his young adult life leaves no place for mourning over his mother’s death. Countering the way society and psychiatry crudely and ruthlessly treat his father absorbs all his attention. Eventually – while in a closed section of a mental hospital – his father dies of a heart attack. Emptying his parent’s home, Dries discovers, among an overload of left behind projects of his father, an old letter from his grandfather. The man appears to have led a very busy and productive life. He was the founder of an internationally renowned seed breeding company (Nunhems Zaden, now owned by BASF) and still had time to paint, write diaries and be the father of 11 children. At first Dries is happy about his discoveries and feels a strong link to his grandfather. But the more he digs into the past, the less he can avoid a growing fear that his father's psychiatric illness might be hereditary, from grandfather to father to son. And what then germinates in Dries' children?

Running time: 01:15:38

Me and the one I used to be (Argentina) by Maria Constanza Niscovolos

Adriana Lestido is a fundamental figure in Argentine photography. Her work reveals a loving and stark look at captivity, motherhood, and the most primitive basic human impulses. Over time, she strips away the human figure and approaches elements in their pure state through landscape. In "Me and Who I Was," the camera turns to show her from an intimate perspective, at 64 years old, seeking new horizons and her desire for transformation and growth.

Running time: 01:09:00

Coda (Singapore) by Jac Min

An intimate portrait of Victoria Chorale, a Singaporean, alumni community choir led by Nelson Kwei, as he prepares them for a return to the international competition stage in Tokyo for the first time in 18 years. And possibly also their last ever. CODA is an observation of the relationship between the music and its Singaporean makers.

Running time: 02:12:34

Fabulaetiem (Italy) by Vittorio Antonacci

Casa Laboratorio di Cenci, 2025. Three young people with cognitive disabilities set out on a journey that will lead them to become educators. A experimental experience that challenges their limits and raises a fundamental question:whom educates who?

Running time: 00:51:00

Creative Force (United States) by Alex LeMay

A feature length documentary that explores the courageous exploits of ordinary Ukrainians who channel their professional skills into acts of bold defiance, culminating in a gripping journey across a war zone to deliver vital supplies to a friend on the front lines.

Running time: 01:31:00

Nothing to See Here: Watts (United States) by Michael Soenen

After a late-night police ride-along in Watts, a filmmaker witnesses a version of Watts that never makes the news.  Searching for a way to understand what he had seen, he poses a simple question: what would happen if the people living the story told it themselves? Twenty residents—rival gang members, police officers, students, parents, and victims of violence—are given iPhones and full control over their narratives. There is no script. No central storyteller. No outside voice shaping the story. Instead, the participants film their lives—raw, unfiltered, and on their own terms. But the process takes an unexpected turn in the editing room. Forced to sit together and watch each other’s lives, people with every reason to distrust one another must decide how their community will be seen—and whether they can agree on a shared version of the truth. As personal histories collide, long-held assumptions begin to break down. What emerges is not consensus, but recognition. And when the filmmakers choose to screen the film for active gang leaders—many of them lifelong rivals—the project takes on real-world stakesWhat began as an attempt to understand a community becomes something far more uncertain—and far more consequential. Nothing to See Here: Watts is a film created by the community—not about it—revealing what becomes possible when people see their enemies differently.

Running time: 01:30:00

Jim Anderson, Average American (United States) by Darren Methlie

This vérité fairytale follows Philadelphia cult figure Jim Anderson, also known as GRIMGRIMGRIM — an artist, provocateur, and chronic self-mythologizer — over the course of a decade spent testing the limits of his own survival. Set against a gentrifying, pre-pandemic Philadelphia, the film traces Jim’s restless movement between Boston and Philly, through gallery openings, noise shows, arrests, and reinventions, as he struggles to construct a life out of bits and pieces of the truth not always his own. 

Known for his collage work and street presence, Jim builds his identity the same way he builds his art: by blending real biography with exaggeration, masks, and bootlegged histories. As drinking, violence, and legal trouble repeatedly derail him, the film stays close — not to explain or redeem, but to observe how a person rewrites himself in order to survive.

Over time, Jim becomes a father and confronts sobriety without guarantees. What begins as a portrait of artistic notoriety gradually shifts into something quieter and more unsettled: a record of self-mythology giving way, unevenly and without triumph, to accountability. Jim Anderson, Average American is less a story of success than of endurance — and of adulthood arriving late, compromised, and real.

Running time: 01:29:00

Let it Dance (Australia) by Carolyn Corkindale

Born of a poor family in Paris, Guy Detot transforms himself through passion and luck into an international ballet dancer, dancing with Pina Bausch in The Rite of Spring and the Ballet Rambert. In 1982 Guy moves to Australia for love,  and  works with the Australian Dance Theatre, before being retired out of ballet and embarking on a journey to use his love of movement to create emotion-driven wood sculptures, based in Penola, South Australia.

Running time: 01:20:25

Where is Love? (United Kingdom) by Trojan Women Project

The extraordinary story of the first ever Arabic production of the musical Oliver! with a junior cast of Syrian refugee children, in Jordan, supported by Sir Cameron Mackintosh

Running time: 01:13:06

Forced Renewables (Spain) by Francisco Javier Fernández Bordonada

In Lopera, a small town in Jaén, the promise of ecological transition turns into a nightmare. Centuries-old olive groves, the legacy of generations of farmers, are being uprooted to make way for massive photovoltaic plants, in an unfair battle between powerful corporations and a community fighting to protect its land. Through firsthand testimonies, striking visuals, and an in-depth analysis of the current energy model, Forced Renewables exposes how progress, when poorly planned and disconnected from rural life, can become an unprecedented ecological, social, and economic disaster. "Discover the dark side of renewable energy in Spain. 'Renewable Forzosas' exposes the environmental and social impacts of poorly planned projects. 

Running time: 01:08:11

Hong Kong - Ga Yau (Germany) by marco di noia

Hong Kong - Ga Yau  is a documentary about the protest movement that has been shaking Hong Kong since June 2019.
The movement was triggered by a proposed law that would have allowed the extraditions to mainland China of Hong Kong citizens, but soon it morphed into a larger revolt against China’s control over the semi-autonomous city. Clashes between riot police and protesters often erupted during rallies and marches calling for democratic freedoms and independent inquiry into the police behaviour. People were walking on the streets, demanding to the government reforms and to defend their freedoms and their identity, from China, from what they call a cultural oppression and a clear attempt to shrink the freedoms that the former British colony had managed to keep up until then. Protesters are questioning the core of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: the 1997 deal between London and Beijing based on the principle of “one nation - two system”, a strange architecture meant to preserve Hong Kong lifestyle and freedoms in the framework of a nation ruled by the strong grip of the Chinese Communist party. The system, if ever was  something, is clearly crumbling: things are changing very fast, and the influence and the policies imposed by Beijing and Xi Jinping’s course are shrinking Hong Kong liberties and shaping the way of life of its population. Despite the loss in the 2019 District Council elections, the government doesn’t seem to be willing to listen, compromise or find any political solution, what has been imposed is de facto a police state at low intensity, brutal and arbitrary arrests are carried out whenever people gather, or try any form of expression of their democratic cause, activists and journalist are more often banned from entering the city, the level of civil rights and  freedom in the city is deteriorating and the situation is leaving little hope for the future.
Running time: 00:50:00

Ahab Was Here: Reflections on Moby Dick (Bulgaria) by Todor "Tosh" Lichev

“Ahab Was Here: Reflections on Moby Dick” rips away the drapes of theatrical pretense to expose the glorious mess of creation as a Bulgarian theater company tackle the white whale of literature—Melville's Moby Dick. Through intimate portraits of the director, writer, costume designer, musician, prop master, and lead actor, the documentary reveals the emotional journey of artistic creation: from doubt and frustration to breakthrough and transcendence. Structured as a series of chapters that spiral like Ahab's maddening hunt itself, this documentary explores the theme of creative legacy as each artist contributes their unique vision to the production. It celebrates the lunacy of those who abandon sensible careers for the invisible labor of theater, pouring their souls into applause that fades and moments that disappear, all for the chance that something of their essence might echo in the darkness after they're gone.

Running time: 00:45:36

Aldo Baldin - A Life for Music (Brazil) by Yves Goulart

Aldo Baldin - A Life for Music is an operatic documentary that unfolds talented tenor Aldo Baldin as he journeyed from humble beginnings in the countryside of Brazil to becoming one of the greatest lyrical singers in the world of his time.  He sang with the greatest conductors, performed in the most famous concert halls and recorded more than 100 albums.  His story is told in the first person by the tenor himself and by musicians, friends and family members, who relive the unique career of this great Brazilian artist.

Running time: 01:42:43