France

A Life Like Any Other

Born in 1988, Faustine Cros graduated from INSAS (Belgium) in editing. In her work, she plays with hybrid forms of documentary, auto-fiction, and experimental film, mixing her own images with family archives. Her graduation film, La Détesteuse was selected and awarded at many international festivals. A Life Like Any Other is her first film produced by Julie Freres at Dérives.

Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods

The films of Angelos Rallis push the boundaries between raw reality and fiction. He draws inspiration from his own life experiences and revolve around unconventional family constructs, post-traumatic behaviour, loss and fate. His visual and artistic approach resides somewhere between contemplative cinema, theatre and creative documentary with fictional aesthetics. The long takes and extended durations permit the director to depict the characters, framed by their immediate environment, in detail. His work induces a sense of slowness so that the viewer has time to understand and connect with the characters and to become immersed in the events unfolding before them.

Against the Tide

Sarvnik Kaur is a documentary filmmaker who strives to tell stories that hide the tension and conflict just beneath the surface of the “normal” and “mundane.”’ Her first feature documentary, A Ballad of Maladies, explores the tradition of political resistance in Kashmir through the work of those poets, musicians, and artists who have turned their art into weapons of resistance during periods of heightened state repression and violence in the region. The film was banned from broadcast on the national network, but it won India’s 64th National Film Award for Best First Non-Feature Film in 2017, Best Film at the 11th biennial Film South Asia, and Best Documentary at the 10th IDSFF Kerala. She has spent three years with the Kolis of Bombay, developing her documentary Against the Tide. She is a recipient of multiple grants from the Sundance Film Fund, Catapult Film Fund, IDFA Bertha, San Francisco Film Fund, AlterCine Foundation, and HotDocs Crosscurrents International. She has also been a fellow at Hot Docs Accelerator Lab, IDFA Academy, and the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Labs.

Last Call

From an early age, Noah Cohen was driven by a desire to make films. At the age of 21, he entered the CinéFabrique to work in production. There, he practiced directing both fiction and documentaries. He hopes to continue in this direction.

A Golden Life

Boubacar Sangaré is a filmmaker, author, and director from Burkina Faso. He directed four short films and co-directed a feature documentary for television. A Golden Life is his first feature documentary for cinema. He is currently developing several other projects, including a road movie documentary, Djéliya, Memory of Manding (selected for La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, in Cannes Film Festival 2022, Miradas Doc, and Hot Docs Forum), and two feature-length fiction films: Le nom qu’on te donne and Les dieux délinquants.

We Will Not Fade Away

Born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in 1987, Alisa Kovalenko studied documentary filmmaking at the Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv, and at the Wajda School in Warsaw, Poland. Her first feature-length documentary Alisa in Warland premiered at IDFA in 2015. Home Games screened at over 100 festivals and won numerous awards. She is the programmer for the international documentary competition of the Molodist film festival in Kyiv. After the launch of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Alisa left the editing room of We Will Not Fade Away, and joined a volunteer unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU), where she fought on the frontline in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions. She fought in the trenches for four months before returning to finish We Will Not Fade Away, which premiered at Berlinale Generation 2023. Meanwhile, as the war in Ukraine continued, Alisa presented a project supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures and Netflix, based on footage filmed during her time in combat, at the IDFA Forum 2022.

Szahara Palota

Nagyi szexuális élete

Mariupolis 2

Mantas Kvedaravičius (1976-2022) litván származású filmkészítő volt, aki a Cambridge Egyetemen szerzett diplomát szociálantropológiából. Első filmje, a Barzakh, számos fesztiválon szerepelt és többek között olyan díjakat is nyert, mint a Amnesty International díj vagy a 2011-es Berlinale Ecumenical zsűri díja. Következő két filmjét, a 2016-os Mariupolis címűt a Berlinale, a 2019-es Parthenon című filmet pedig a Venice International Critics’ Week válogatta be. Mantas Kvedaravičiust 2022 márciusának végén az orosz csapatok Mariupolban megölték, miközben az orosz megszállásról forgatott.

23rd Verzió

17-25 NOVEMBER 2026.