A long chalk trail on the asphalt, like a sign on the streets of Budapest saying ‘I exist too’. Hoarse voices, the edges of the streets as a refuge, reluctant philosophies of life. Shaky and almost neurotic camera movements. Restless editing. Lurid photography. Outspoken and sometimes outright foul conversations. The trail keeps going, until it reaches a young boy tracing it on the sidewalk.

Following the shaking camera and loud sounds of skateboard wheels on concrete, we enter the life of an 8-year-old boy, Sanyi, when director Dávid Mikulán meets him for the first time at Boráros tér in Budapest. Sanyi is a rebellious kid who doesn’t like when people tell him what to do. He chooses to stay outside, play around, skateboard, and draw things on the streets with chalk. Home is a 28...

A family gathers to celebrate Stefie’s second birthday. Four generations of women are present, and they cheer as Stefie blows out the candles. There’s cake, food is being prepared in the oven. Everything seems to be fine. It’s mid-February of 2022, and they are in Kyiv, visiting from Mariupol. As the audience, we already know what’s in store for them. Some on the screen sense it, too, and yet...

My name is Kriszta Bódis..., I used to be a documentary filmmaker. I'm not saying that my profession has changed. On the contrary. The past tense implies a turning point.

A Frenchman in the Congo may raise eyebrows even today, but Armel Hostiou’s The Other Profile does something very different in this documentary revolving around identity theft and the quest to find the culprit, with unusual results. In what appears to be a film stemming from the director’s sheer curiosity with the situation, he takes on his first documentary project with laudable results, despite...

We are often taught from a young age that “Blood is thicker than water”. Except that later in life, we grow more and more tolerant towards the fact that not all families are the same, and not all families are willing to reconcile differences and conflicts. Sometimes families, despite the blood relations, can be abusive and reject you for who you are.

My ne zgasnemo (We Will Not Fade Away) is the title of filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko’s newest documentary first screened at the Berlinale film festival in February 2023, one year after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film takes place in the Donbass, more precisely in Zolote-4 and the village of Stanytsia, near the frontline where Ukrainian military and Pro-Russian...

A solid contribution to the global documentary heritage is what Pascale Bourgaux with Hawar, Our Banished Children brought to the table in 2023. The horrors of the already-known story of the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women captured by Daesh jihadists, bring with them this time the necessary background perspective to understand the dilemma of the liberated women returning to their community...

Motherland is above everything – this is the idea, which goes through the whole documentary film – although the harsh picture we are shown completely mirrors the reality, too.