While Karlovy Vary may be best known for its star wattage and warm midsummer embrace of fiction auteurs, this year’s 59th edition (July 4–12) once again made a powerful case for documentary’s enduring vitality. Across the official selection, sidebars, and special screenings, nonfiction titles proved indispensable in reflecting Europe and the region’s evolving identities, eccentricities, and contradictions. This festival dispatch includes reviews of Grand Prix-winner Better Go Mad in the Wild, TrepaNation, Action Item, and Divia.
Docs about refugees
Documentary is proud to debut a clip from Europe’s New Faces, directed by Sam Abbas. The film is an empathetic, unfiltered depiction of both the challenges and triumphs faced by migrants—from the harrowing journey across the Mediterranean sea from Africa to the closely-knit communities they create in the squats of Paris.
Since Beyond Utopia debuted at last year’s Sundance, where it won the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary, the film has screened at film festivals
Amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, one of the IDFA’s most high-profile Palestinian films, Mohamed Jabaly’s Life Is Beautiful documents roughly seven
At the end of August 2021, the images of frantic Afghanis crowding Kabul airport were a stark reminder of the despair with which people flee their
Taking Best Documentary Feature Film at last year's Outfest, Tom Shepard's Unsettled, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee, adheres to every
When filmmaker Laura Nix walked into a dance studio in the San Gabriel Valley to find 40 people ballroom-dancing in the middle of the day, she thought
John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary short Life Overtakes Me, an IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grantee
Filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald’s upbringing in Oregon defied the norm, even in a state known for alternative lifestyles. Consider the family dog: his name
June 20 th is World Refugee Day. It has been 18 years since the United Nations General Assembly declaration and 67 years since the 1951 Refugee