July 14, 2026
One of DokuFest's most adventurous and genre-defying programmes returns for its 25th edition. Fiction/Non-Fiction occupies the fertile space between documentary and fiction, where the tools of storytelling meet the observational power of non-fiction, and where reality is constantly reshaped through imagination, memory, and lived experience.
This year's selection journeys across landscapes both physical and emotional: from remote wildernesses and subterranean worlds to unfinished cities, dreamscapes, and war-torn territories. Together, these films explore lives suspended between memory and change, where belonging, history, and survival are continually renegotiated.
In Cold Metal, directed by Clemente Castor, a young man descends into the earth in search of lost memories, as the landscape itself becomes a living archive of personal and collective history. Ben Rivers' Mare's Nest follows a child wandering through a mysterious world, encountering different possibilities for living while stepping into an uncertain future. Meanwhile, Isabel Pagliai's Fantasy drifts into a nocturnal realm where solitude, dreams, and desire dissolve the boundaries between reality and imagination.
Wong Ka Ki's I Heard That They Are Not Going To See Each Other Anymore offers an intimate portrait of love, longing, and self-blame, tracing the fragile emotional landscapes that emerge when relationships begin to unravel. From these inner geographies, Maureen Fazendeiro's The Seasons expands outward to the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, weaving together the voices of rural workers, archaeologists, amateur footage, legends, poetry, and folklore into a rich portrait of a place where history and myth coexist.
Questions of home, community, and life on the margins continue in Miro Remo's Better Go Mad in the Wild, where twin brothers Franta and Ondra face the painful possibility of separation as their dreams for the future diverge. Ivan Marković's Promised Spaces examines another form of displacement, contrasting the lives of migrant construction workers with those inhabiting the luxury developments they build, revealing the isolation embedded within contemporary urban landscapes.
Last but not least is Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab, a devastating reconstruction of the emergency calls surrounding six-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under fire in Gaza in January 2024. Through a single voice struggling to be heard, the film bears witness to one of the most harrowing realities of our time.
From dream logic and fantasy to urgent testimonies drawn from recent history, the films in Fiction/Non-Fiction challenge conventional distinctions between the imagined and the real. Together, they reveal how cinema can inhabit the uncertain space where fiction and documentary not only meet, but transform one another.
