Docs Open Debates

When public debate hardens, documentaries can bring us closer to the people and places behind the headlines. This year’s selection takes us from a police chief’s final months before his assassination, to a war working its way into ordinary gestures, young people in Prague talking about love and fear, a refugee community making a home in a former sanatorium, and a Yugo driven across America, breaking down often enough for warm encounters. 

These films do not offer simple answers. Instead, they bring large questions – about war, identity, belonging, memory and change – into the lives of individuals and communities. Documentaries that open up a conversation by showing us what these questions look and feel like on the ground.

Marko Grba Singh and Stefan Malešević, film programmers

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  Electing Ms Santa
  In a remote Moldovan village, 42-year-old Elena, known locally as Santa Claus, challenges social and family conventions when she decides to run for mayor.
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  Here, Elsewhere
  Unable to film in Nagorno-Karabakh himself, the filmmaker asks his friends to document their final months there. Two months later, war breaks out.
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  Militantropos
  In a Ukraine transformed by Russia’s full-scale invasion, ordinary people flee, grieve, resist and fight as war becomes part of their everyday lives and of who they are.
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  Minimum Love
  On the streets of Prague at night, a young filmmaker asks strangers what they fear, desire and believe in, revealing a generation caught between uncertainty, loneliness and a longing for love.
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  Outliving Shakespeare
  In a decaying retirement home from Soviet times, a vibrant group of elders cling to life by staging Shakespeare. Loneliness lingers beyond the theatre’s doors until drama begins to blur with reality.
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  Peacemaker
  In 1991, Josip Reihl-Kir, the Osijek police chief who fought tirelessly to prevent war through dialogue and negotiation, was assassinated. This is the story of the peacemaker we are all waiting for.
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  River Dreams
  Along a Kazakh river, women lay bare love, rage and survival. Their voices cut through water and silence, turning scars into resistance.
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  Special Operation
  When Russian forces occupied the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its CCTV cameras continued recording. Built entirely from this footage, Special Operation transforms surveillance images into evidence of nuclear terror.
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  The Kartli Kingdom
  An observational documentary about Kartli, a crumbling sanatorium in Tbilisi that became a home to refugees fleeing the Abkhazia war – a palace of life and death where a temporary refuge has endured for three decades, and dreams of a promised land slowly fade away.
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  Yugo Goes to America
  Three young friends from Serbia drive a decades-old Yugo from New York to Los Angeles, retracing the forgotten journey of Yugoslavia’s most infamous export in this funny and poignant road documentary.