Several films in this year’s selection arrive in Budapest directly from some of the world’s most important international festivals. Imago, which explores identity and the search for home through the story of a Chechen man returning from exile to build a house, won the award for Best Documentary at Cannes; its director, Déni Oumar Pitsaev, will also be a guest of Verzió. Filmed over ten years, One in a Million follows a Syrian girl and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, tracing years of displacement and integration; the film won two awards at Sundance. To Hold a Mountain, about a mother and daughter living in the Montenegrin mountains and fighting to protect their land, received Sundance’s top documentary prize. Birds of War, which also arrives at Verzió with a Sundance award, follows a Lebanese journalist and a Syrian cameraman as they look back on their love story.
“This year’s programme once again includes many films that Hungarian audiences may not have another opportunity to see, either in cinemas or through other channels. But an even more important connection between them is that they teach us to remain curious at a time when both the image itself and the way we interpret it have become uncertain,” says Festival Director Enikő Gyureskó.
Who Is Holding the Camera?
Several films respond very directly to this year’s motto, “Seeing is Believing?” In Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă’s short film Shot Reverse Shot, photographs taken by an American journalist in communist Romania are juxtaposed with surveillance images secretly taken of him by the Securitate: the same situation becomes an entirely different story depending on who is looking.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison will also be a guest of the festival. His new film, Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon, reconstructs the same arrest on a Chicago street through mobile-phone footage shot by local residents and body-camera recordings made by the authorities. Cult essay filmmaker Mark Cousins, one of the most distinctive voices in international cinema, asks on an entirely different scale how we look at reality. His new 16-hour series, The Story of Documentary Film, takes viewers through more than a century of moving images; four episodes will be shown at Verzió, for the first time in Hungary.
Bad Bunny’s Music Video Director, Music by Arca and a Sci-Fi Universe Built with a Phone
Stillz made his name directing music videos for Bad Bunny and Rosalía. His first feature film, Barrio Triste, takes viewers to a poor neighbourhood of Medellín in 1987. Four teenagers steal a television crew’s camera and begin filming their own lives; social realism gradually turns into found-footage horror and a psychedelic vision. The score was composed by queer icon Arca, named Artist of the Decade by Vice, while Harmony Korine is among the film’s producers.
The festival will close with this year’s Tribeca Viewpoints Award winner, Crocodile. The Critics, a young filmmaking collective from Kaduna, Nigeria, began making science-fiction films with a single phone, homemade sets and visual effects they taught themselves to create, eventually attracting the attention of Hollywood. Thirteen years in the making, the documentary is both a coming-of-age story and an account of how imagination can become a way out of a world that seems too small. Idris Elba is an executive producer of the film.
Abortion, Menopause and the World’s Fault Lines
This year’s programme approaches several subjects that are still difficult to discuss openly. The director of The Culprits begins with the secret of her own teenage abortion, which she kept for seven years; Green Light follows the ethical decisions surrounding assisted dying; while Menopause Mystery asks why we still know so little about a transition that affects hundreds of millions of women. Marta Duran Lozano, director of The Culprits, and Pavel Cuzuioc, director of Green Light, will both be coming to Budapest.
War, the colonial past and the ecological crisis once again have a strong presence in the programme. Films in the Ukrainian section bring audiences close to the conflict, from the front lines to conflict-related sexual violence. Of Mud and Blood explores the connection between coltan mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the global electronics industry, while Austrian filmmaker and three-time Verzió veteran Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Melt follows the disappearance of snow and ice from Japan to Antarctica.
Several films in this year’s programme also ask what it means to be a man today. Bucks Harbor, for example, examines family patterns and boys’ identities within the tough world of an American fishing village, while other films explore changing ideas of masculinity through war, fatherhood and the expectations of communities.
Roma Stories, Past and Present
The Romakép section places contemporary films alongside landmark works from the history of Hungarian documentary cinema. The Village of Roses follows a Roma community near Milan for almost six years; beginning with the story of a school bus that fails to arrive, the film gradually reveals the effects of prejudice and far-right politics. Hanna Heilborn and Dijana Pavlovic will be guests of the festival.
In Better Find It Out from Me – Six Roma Portraits from the Cristuru Region, Miska Lakatos explores Roma identity through portraits of six Transylvanian people of different ages, consciously avoiding familiar stereotypes. Two seminal documentaries by Pál Schiffer will also return to the big screen: What Are Gipsy Children Doing? and Black Train. The programme is presented as part of the FILMDECO project with the support of the European Union.
A More Accessible Festival Experience
This year, Verzió is taking several steps to reduce barriers to cinema-going. Four films will be screened with SDH subtitles, while Papa and Under the Dance Floor will also have screenings with Hungarian audio description.
Over the festival weekend, Verzió will also hold a relaxed screening, with dimmed lighting, lower sound levels and greater freedom of movement. Childcare will be available for parents with young children in cooperation with the 12th-grade students specialising in early childhood education at BGSZC Pesterzsébet Technical School. Accessible screenings and sensitive content will be clearly marked in the programme, and detailed accessibility information will be provided for the festival venues.
The festival will open on 16 November with Papa, winner of the Grand Prize at the Hungarian Film Festival. Six Hungarian feature-length documentaries will compete in the Hungarian Competition, alongside a separate competition for Hungarian short documentaries.
The 23rd Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival will take place from 16 to 25 November 2026 in Budapest and eight other Hungarian cities.