Modern Times Review

14/10/2026

The ninth edition of the FIFDH Genève training programme gathers projects from around the world, with subjects ranging from human trafficking in Europe to rising seas in Kerala.

FIFDH Impact Days has selected twelve documentary projects for its 2027 Impact Lab, to pitch their campaigns in Geneva from 7 to 9 March 2027.

12/10/2026

‘NAZA: The Real (aka. FULL) Story’ appeared online under the same title, on the same rooftops, on the same night, and with an online footprint built to deceive anyone looking for the original Special Jury Prize winner at Venice. The original ‘NAZA’ was produced by The Guardian, which releases it for free in November.

Its website was registered mere days after the 25-minute ovation-receiving premiere and first presented itself as the original film’s promotional page, naming Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor as directors and stripping the synopsis of Palestinian civilian deaths. The site now claims 42 million views. The YouTube page shows about 30,000. Israeli embassies worldwide have promoted it.

We review the film itself: a 49-minute tour of children’s bedrooms, narrated by an unnamed officer, Maj. Y, who is never asked a question, with testimony «approved for release». It never mentions AI use or how many Palestinians have died.

«Anyone who watches both will notice that only one of them asks its witnesses anything.»

Read John Hawkins’ full review:

An «approved» Israeli reply to Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's NAZA borrows its title, its rooftops and its night, and answers a film about targeting with a tour of children's bedrooms.

09/10/2026

Louise Unmack Kjeldsen sought answers about her own menopause. Her documentary ‘Menopause Mystery’ follows her to researchers in Bergen, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Melbourne. One of them, Pauline Maki, found that menopause symptoms such as hot flashes cause measurable changes in the brain, including those associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Less than 5% of global research funding goes to women’s health.

In 2024, The Lancet published a rebuttal arguing that society should stop medicalising menopause. Reviewing the film, Melita Zajc calls the reaction an orchestrated denial of women scientists’ findings, and notes that researchers in the field may now struggle to get funded.

‘Menopause Mystery’ currently screens at Nepatogus Kinas / Inconvenient Films

Read Melita Zajc’s full review:

Louise Unmack Kjeldsen's documentary 'Menopause Mystery' explores a possible link between menopause and Alzheimer's, and the journal that rejected it.

09/10/2026

The 23rd Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival opens in Budapest on November 16 with more than 80 films, a programme shaped by the question of whether seeing is still believing, and its first-ever grant from the National Film Institute.

08/10/2026

At 3:20 on the afternoon of 17 September 2024, Mohammad Halawi's pager went off as he guided his young son to the toilet. Halawi was one of thousands wounded when more than 4,000 pagers exploded across Lebanon, with some 800 walkie-talkies following the next day. The toll over those two days was at least 37 dead, two of them children, and more than 3,000 wounded.

Al Jazeera's two-part investigation 'The Trap', led on screen by Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada, follows the operation from a Budapest company and a factory trail running through Bulgaria and Hong Kong. The trail ends at the White House, where Netanyahu handed Donald Trump a gold-plated pager inscribed «Press with both hands.»

It streams free on Al Jazeera 360.

Read John Hawkins' full review:

08/10/2026

More than 150 submissions have been narrowed down to 22 documentary projects for the third edition of greenstories environmental film lab and pitching forum, held in Goa from 11 to 17 November.

greenstories, the Asian environmental documentary lab and pitching forum, returns to Goa from 11 to 17 November with 22 selected projects.

07/10/2026

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, John Hawkins reviews two documentaries that cover the same ground at the foot of the towers.

'The Responders: Breaking the Silence' gathers firefighters, paramedics, and police who describe explosions they heard, saw, and felt that morning, and calls for the attacks to be reopened as a criminal case. '32 Frames: A 9/11 Mystery' follows a single roll of film pulled from the rubble toward the person who shot it.

Read John Hawkins' full review:

Review of the 9/11 documentaries 'The Responders' and '32 Frames', on first-responder testimony of explosions and a roll of film traced to its photographer.

07/10/2026

Ghassan Kanafani was 36 when the Mossad killed him in Beirut in 1972. A refugee from the 1948 Nakba and editor of the PFLP's newspaper al-Hadaf, he was already the most famous radical Palestinian intellectual of his time, remembered by the Lebanese Star as «a commando who never fired a gun». His writings are finally available in English as Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi and published by Pluto Press, and, unsurprisingly, they read as if they were written today.

Read Francesca Borri's full review:

07/10/2026

The 27th Filmový festival Jeden svet opens in Bratislava on 20 October with BONDS as its theme and Alisa Kovalenko's 'Traces' at the centre of the programme.

The 27th One World International Documentary Film Festival opens in Bratislava, Slovakia on 20 October with BONDS as its theme and Alisa Kovalenko's Traces at the centre of the programme.

06/10/2026

Noor Abed was born in Palestine in 1988 and works between Ramallah and Amsterdam. She shoots on Super-8 and 16mm with local Palestinians as her collaborators. Her films carry no voiceover and little explanation. Truls Lie met her at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb, where her exhibition 'Cineography of a Landscape' shows three works, among them 'A Night We Held Between', the e-flux Film Award winner shot in caves, carved rock and underground passages across Palestine. He ran the conversation as a keyword game, and she answered with whatever came first.

Landscape is the protagonist of her films, she says, and bodies respond to it. On Palestine being one of the most documented places on earth, she asks herself before every record whether the photograph needs to exist at all, and insists that images «need to resist the history of colonial representation imposed on us.» She describes genocide as the peak of a long history of occupation, with Europe, the US and Arab states all complicit in preparing the ground. On 7 October she says: «the beginning of our liberation.»

Read Truls Lie's full interview: