ENFF 2026 Programme Announced
Welcome to the 17th Edition of Eastern Neighbours Film Festival!
This year, ENFF once again looks beyond the well-trodden paths of European cinema. Five days of new films from broader Eastern Europe – a region that has been making exceptional films for a century, with remarkable courage, and still is. We bring films that rarely reach Dutch big screens – some that stood out at international festivals, alongside discoveries that have barely travelled beyond their homes. For many of the films in our selection, this means their Dutch premiere.
In the Focus programme Roots, we explore what happens when people leave their cultural home. Where origins and borders are used to divide people into categories, these films show how little actually stays fixed across generations and displacement. With Out of Focus – Serbia, we turn to a situation that rarely reaches the Netherlands. For almost two years, the Film Center Serbia has approved no new productions, while mass protests against an increasingly authoritarian regime have filled the streets. Meanwhile, filmmakers have stubbornly kept working, as the films in this section show. In an accompanying panel they’ll speak about what it means to persist against increasingly difficult odds. In Through Women’s Lenses, the world becomes visible from women’s positions. Their different ways of looking at family, community, politics and place open up new ways of telling stories through cinema.
Beyond the films, we also present a number of engaging talks and panels. Forty years after the Chornobyl disaster and thirty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we hold a conversation about what remains when a system collapses – not as historical fact, but as something that still shapes generations to come. And in our November programme, after our festival days, we present Old Gold with six screenings in which we celebrate a hundred years of Pavle Vuisić. From the village to the city, from tragedy to comedy, we revisit an actor whose characters became inseparable from the everyday life of Yugoslav cinema.
Behind the programme is a team of four dedicated programmers, guided in their selection by artistic vision and social urgency: Marko Grba Singh and Stefan Malešević curate the engaged main programme, Temra Pavlović curates experimental cinema in Between Film and Art, and Stefan Pavlović leads the New Talents Competition of emerging filmmakers from all across our wide region. The selection is broad and varied – from feature films, documentaries and essayistic forms to comedy and animation, and even an interactive book presentation and audio installation.
Experience these films and meet their makers in the warm atmosphere of the festival, from 4 to 8 November at Filmhuis Den Haag. Through our On Tour programme, our festival highlights will also travel to other Dutch cities. I’m very glad to present this year’s programme, made possible by the dedication of our excellent team, and I look forward to seeing you at the festival.
Koštana Banović, festival director
