Hungarian Premiere

Almost Fine

Fanni Hatházi is a director and producer. She graduated with an MA in documentary directing from the University of Film and Theatre Arts. In the last ten years she has worked as a field producer and reporter for various TV news and entertainment programs. She’s also researching how the emergence of Netflix and other streaming services has changed the documentary market, as she strongly believes that understanding these new models of distribution is crucial in reaching future audiences.

Retrograde

Outside

Olha Zhurba directs and edits documentary and fiction films, commercials, and music videos. She graduated from the I. Karpenko-Karogo National University of Theatre, Film and Television in Kiev in 2010, with a degree from the Department of Cinema Documentary Directing.

Nelly & Nadine

Magnus Gertten is a director and producer born in Limhamn, Sweden, in 1953. He was a television and radio journalist for several years before turning to filmmaking in 1998. He has made 15 documentaries for Swedish and international television, which have been broadcast and screened at festivals in more than 60 countries, and which have won numerous awards. He works as a director, producer, narrative consultant, and adviser for his film production company, Auto Images.

Myanmar Diaries

The Myanmar Film Collective is a group of anonymous young filmmakers in Myanmar, working with an anonymous group of European film professionals, who, as an act of creative resistance, are determined to continue making films in the aftermath of the military coup of 1 February.

Midwives

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing has worked as a freelance filmmaker in Myanmar since 2006, acting as director, producer, editor, and sound recordist after attending film schools in both Myanmar and Germany. Her short, Burmese Butterfly played festivals in over 20 countries, and Period@Period won for best short at the Wathan Film Festival. Midwives is her feature documentary debut.

Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in 1989, in Yarmouk, and studied sociology at the University of Damascus. Prior to the revolution, he was a coordinator of activities and volunteers for the UN. Along with several friends, he created the humanitarian aid association Wataad, which carried out dozens of projects in Syria, particularly in Yarmouk. He participated in several documentary films related to life at the Yarmouk camp, notably as a cameraman for 194. Us, Children of the Camp, which premiered at Visions du Réel in 2017. The German magazine Peace Green identified him as a 2014 “peacemaker”. He received the Per Anger Human Rights Award in Sweden, in 2016. Abdallah currently lives in Germany, where he recently received refugee status.

The Killing of a Journalist

Matt Sarnecki is a journalist, producer, and film director at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He earned a BA in political science and history at Columbia University. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania before moving to Prague, Czech Republic, where he held a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2013 he has lived in Bucharest, Romania. His documentary Killing Pavel, about the murder of investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal in 2017, and the DIG Award (Italy) in 2018.

f@ck this job

Vera Krichevskaya is the co-founder of Dozhd (TV Rain) Russia, the only independent, private television channel in Russia. She is also an award-winning television director, having worked for NTV and 24DOC as a senior producer and director.

Bigger Than Trauma

Born in 1977, Vedrana Pribačić is a Croatian journalist, director and scriptwriter with a master’s degree in politics. She has worked as a television reporter and editor-in-chief since 2000. In 2016 she directed a TV documentary, The Factory is Ours! which was presented at several festivals. She developed her first feature documentary, Bigger Than Trauma, at FOCAL's intensive European residential masterclass, and pitched the project at the Balkan film market pitch in Tirana, Albania; When East Meets West; Zagrebdox Pro Pitching; Docu Rough Cut Boutique, and elsewhere.

22nd Verzió

11-19 NOVEMBER 2025.