August 1, 2025
Dear friends,
As I struggle to write this welcome letter in these times of uncertainty, I cannot help but go back to a few months ago and to a different struggle, that of when we were brainstorming and deciding the theme of this festival. In the end, we chose a grim, unhappy and diagnostic one. Endless Greed Mental Void, we called it: a sort of diagnostic mirror to the world that we live in.
Throughout this year’s programme and across many of the films we’ve selected, you’ll find countless struggles and even more uncertainty and suffering: from the frontline of Ukraine to the shores of Cape Verde, from the swamps of Cuba to the Everglades, from the Atacama Desert to the bat caves of China.
Unforgettable faces of mothers still looking and yearning for their missed ones in Sri Lanka, a panicked mother looking for her separated kid on the south border of USA, an absent mother of a child deep in rural China, or a filmmaker’s missing mother somewhere in Ireland. And many, many more!
Individual as well as collective struggles. Deep and unsettling suffering. With some rays of joy here and there.
Stories so great and filmmakers so brave that watching these films and putting up this programme felt both terrifying and a blessing at the same time. Because making films, speaking and even thinking has become so difficult today in the presence of such enormous struggle and suffering.
We began programming this edition with multiple wars unfolding. Bombings are still a daily occurrence, death is omnipresent while waiting at food lines in Gaza, and hospitals are the deadliest places to be. Still no end in sight to this madness. This is the atmosphere that we are working in. In a world where the choice of not speaking up to injustice is turning into the norm. Numbness into a daily occurrence. Hope into a distant idea.
This year’s programme is an attempt to resist this numbness. To reclaim language from manipulation. To insist that the act of telling, listening, and gathering still matters, and that festivals like this one also matter, despite everything and against all odds.
So, I will refrain from writing more specifically about films and events and everything else that is part of the festival and what is usually common for me to write about on such an occasion. I just leave it to all of you to discover instead.
I invite you to experience the festival by offering you these films, conversations and music, with the hope that, by doing so, you will be rewarded as much as we were in preparing all this for you.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to all the extraordinary people who have made this beautiful journey with us and this dream of ours possible: our generous sponsors and partners, the dedicated DokuFest team, and all of our wonderful volunteers, as well as to the filmmakers and artists who shared their work with us this year. We are very well aware that this festival would not be possible without you. Thank you.
Here’s to a great festival for us all!
Veton Nurkollari
Artistic Director
