Modern Times Review

13/11/2025

Debra Granik’s new limited series, 'Conbody vs Everybody,' tracks eight years in the life of Coss Marte, from teenage drug kingpin on the Lower East Side to the founder of a prison-style fitness startup, Conbody,Conbody that hires formerly incarcerated trainers.

Granik pairs Coss’s hustle with a city in flux and asks: if 650,000 people leave US prisons each year and over three-quarters are back inside within five, what does «second chance» really mean without structural change?

JUSTICE: Street skills meet entrepreneurship as a fitness venture builds community, educates clients about life inside, and pushes back against cycles of stigma.

13/11/2025

The intimate slow festival of Mallorca returns this month with eight documentaries and a sound-focused programme.

MajorDocs, the Mallorca Documentary Film Festival, has unveiled the complete programme for its seventh edition, running 25–29 November across venues including Teatre Xesc Forteza (opening gala), C…

12/11/2025

Srđan Kovačević’s DOK Leipzig World Premiere, 'The Thing to Be Done,' goes inside Ljubljana’s Workers’ Advisory Office, where exploitation isn't abstraction.

Migrant and local workers arrive with cancelled health insurance, withheld wages needed for rent and remittances, “lost” pension payments, contracts booby-trapped with fines, and threats that a revoked permit will send them home.

Kovačević connects these cramped rooms to the larger map of global capital: a neocolonial labour market that relies on silence.

LABOUR: A frontline portrait of cross-border exploitation and quiet solidarity.

12/11/2025

The 2025 IDFA starts today with Chile, once again, well represented.

Chile will present a broad slate of films, projects and industry initiatives at the 38th , running 13–27 November. Headlining the delegation is Blue Silence (Silencio Azul) by Matías Rojas Ru…

11/11/2025

Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival kicks off its 2025 edition today and runs through 19 November (in person).

Find all MTR coverage - https://www.moderntimes.review/tag/verzio-international-human-rights-documentary-film-festival/

07/11/2025

Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion’s 'Melt' is a wide-angle time capsule from the world’s snow belts: Niigata to Val d’Isère, Aletsch to Vatnajökull and the Ekström Ice Shelf.

With his signature static frames, he listens to farmers, glacier workers, ice-road crews and polar scientists who all say the same thing in different dialects. The film observes how machines, markets and memories cling to winter while geology moves on.

From DOK Leipzig, read Alexandra Biernacka's perspective on 'Melt' ⬇️

CLIMATE: Geyrhalter’s latest observes global snowscapes and people amid tourism and research, documenting vanishing ice, extreme weather, and urgent climate-policy questions.

06/11/2025

Nathan Grossman’s 'Climate in Therapy' turns the camera toward a closed-door group therapy for seven climate scientists. The session will use a Gestalt-inspired method: ask them to name their anger, draw their deepest fears, and speak to a child from 2050. It's a quiet thesis: if institutions won’t act on the data, they can at least care for those carrying it.

A Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival world premiere, read Sonya Vseliubska's perspective on 'Climate in Therapy' ⬇️

CLIMATE: A Gestalt-inspired session lets climate scientists grieve, rage, and exhale, revealing systemic neglect and surprising ‘Safe Spaces’ outcome.

05/11/2025

Premiering at Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival , Dāvis Sīmanis’ Death of Death sidesteps hype to probe the deeper rupture that is our crisis of mind in which our cognitive, social, and emotional energies become extractive frontiers.

From cryonics tanks outside Moscow to wellness biohacks and luxury coffin showrooms, life extension becomes a marketplace, while wars keep ending lives early. If we pour billions into outsmarting mortality, why can’t we stop manufacturing death?

AI: An unsentimental tour through longevity gurus, robotic promises, and icy vaults, challenging who benefits when death becomes monetizable by technology.

04/11/2025

What does survival sound like when you’re a child in a war?

In 'Memory,' Vladlena Sandu scores the Chechen conflicts through a girl’s inner soundtrack, counterpoint to a city in flames. The film threads personal fracture into a map of forced migration.

CONFLICT: A child’s-eye chronicle of Grozny, migration, and abuse, refracted into lyrical images that soften brutality without forgetting.

03/11/2025

On 24 October 1975, 90% of Iceland’s women took a “day off.” An entire country paused to make one truth visible: if women stop, everything stops.

'The Day Iceland Stood Still' revisits that unprecedented strike through a distinctly female lens to ask how women across classes, ages, and parties moved as one. It’s a history lesson with pulse and humour and a reminder of the tools we still need today.

From Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival Testimonies, read Melta Zajc's perspective on 'The Day Iceland Stood Still' ⬇️

FEMINISM: How 90% of Iceland’s women halted a nation in 1975

03/11/2025

10 days of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival concluded over the weekend with a robust closing ceremony and awards.

The 29th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival ran in Jihlava from 24 October to 2 November 2025, showing more than 300 films across ten days. Ji.hlava 2025 winners Opus Bonum Main Awar…

31/10/2025

A true story from 2008 returns as a German NGO «reopens» Jenin’s cinema, but the only person who can actually run the coal-arc projector, veteran operator Hussein Darby, is sidelined, unpaid, and told not to interfere.

'Habibi Hussein' traces how aid projects became what many Palestinians call the «Third Occupation,» where expertise is imported, local knowledge is ignored, and PR passes for accountability.

PALESTINE: From Jenin to future Gaza rebuilds, one cinema’s reopening becomes parable of aid spectacle, cultural erasure, and sidelined local knowledge.