09/10/2026 - The documentary festival will combine international and Czech competitions with a Trinh T Minh-ha retrospective, an anniversary film essay and an industry focus on Montenegro

Good Girls by Ania Winiarska

The 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (23 October-1 November) will explore documentary cinema’s ability to influence society through its anniversary strand Films That Changed the World. This 13-film selection brings together works that have shaped public debate, contributed to legislative change and helped overturn wrongful convictions, including Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. “The 30 years of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival have borne witness to the transformation of documentary film, which has become one of the principal ways of understanding today’s increasingly complex and interconnected world,” says festival director Marek Hovorka. The programme also features a retrospective of Vietnamese-US filmmaker and theorist Trinh T Minh-ha, and a showcase celebrating Prague film school FAMU’s 80th anniversary. Andrea Slováková and Janka Vlčková’s archival essay Ji.hlava 30: Thinking Through Film will premiere, drawing on three decades of festival recordings. Other international highlights include Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Viktor Kossakovsky’s Trillion and Panh’s We Are the Fruits of the Forest.

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The main international competition, Opus Bonum, comprises 14 films: ten world, three international and one European premiere. Competing for the $10,000 (approximately €8,907) main award are Filip Remunda’s Love Exposed (Czech Republic/Slovakia), examining photographer Vlastimil Kula’s relationship with his daughter, and Nikola Klinger’s Land of Fire (Germany/Czech Republic), observing a Canadian region affected by wildfires and the disappearances of indigenous women. Other world premieres include Yevhen Titarenko’s I See No Death (Ukraine/Latvia), following Ukrainian drone operators, and Ania Winiarska’s Good Girls (Sweden/Finland), observing life inside a Catholic reformatory for teenage girls in Łódź. Agnė Dovydaitytė and Alexander Belinski’s Baltic UXO (Lithuania/Germany/Latvia), examining the environmental legacy of wartime ordnance dumped at sea, receives its international premiere, while Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon (France), co-created with blind students in Paris, screens as a European premiere. Both Love Exposed and Land of Fire also feature in the competition for domestic films, Czech Joy, whose published line-up takes in 27 movies. Other world premieres include Pavel Štingl’s Jaroslav Seifert: A Rhythm Outside Time, Mariana Macháňová’s intimate bereavement diary Birdie and Eliška Cílková Andršová’s Up Again, following teenage figure-skating champion Barbora Vránková.

Beyond the screenings, the Inspiration Forum will welcome The Dawn of Everything co-author David Wengrow and Forensic Architecture’s Samaneh Moafi. Scheduled for 27-30 October, the industry programme (click here for more information) will spotlight Montenegro through pitches and a panel. The New Visions Forum presentations will showcase projects from Europe (see the news), the USA, and East and Southeast Asia, while Emerging Producers 2027 will introduce 18 producers. The provisional schedule also includes matchmaking, project round-tables, discussions on Czech documentary financing and working conditions, Future Memory Lab presentations and a Creative Europe - MEDIA funding session.