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The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood. Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity. “The camera doesn’t lie,” Abbas Kiarostami used to say in his workshop. “One can trust the camera.” That’s why I recorded those moments. Now, after finishing the film, I am no longer sure I can truly “trust the camera”. Every day in the editing room, I could create a different family. At times, my father was the kindest person a child could wish for; at others, the devil on earth. Sometimes I was the most humorous son, entertaining my parents endlessly; at other moments I was absent. And my mother? She remained constant — loving, deeply empathetic, intelligent and, above all, fierce. How could a camera that does not lie allow me to leave the editing room every day with a new version of our family? That remains a mystery to me. I never intended to make a faithful documentary about the Fesharaki family. What interested me most were the small narratives that emerge when people love each other. Perhaps through this film, viewers may glimpse a family and understand how the beloved revolution of my parents’ generation was stolen from them, and how the brutal oppression that followed ruined not only their lives but also those of their children. Yet there is one thing that keeps us all together: hope.’

Raised within Taliban ideology, twenty-three-year-old Samim lives between promises of martyrdom and the ordinariness of farming and family life. His teenage brother Rafi idolises him and those promises, the only vision of the world they have ever known. Aboozar Amini: ‘As a member of the Hazara ethnicity, a group historically marginalised and oppressed by the Taliban and Pashtuns, one might expect me to harbour resentment towards my protagonist. Yet such judgment fails to satisfy me. As an artist, my foremost inclination is to transcend the impulse to condemn, creating a space where observation can delve deeper. This film does not merely depict another faceless Taliban soldier. Rather, it seeks to engage with him as an individual. My vision of Afghanistan aims to confront the humanity of my protagonist, even if he espouses radical ideologies. By living alongside him, I hope to hold up a mirror wherein he may glimpse his own reflection, however monstrous it may be. Though there are inherent limitations, I am committed to seizing every opportunity to explore their inner world. Even the smallest window into their psyche is a precious gift that I intend to embrace fully.In this way, this is not a Taliban-sympathising film, but rather a mirror to their faces.’

Filmed over three and a half years on Ukraine’s frontline, the film follows a young filmmaker who trades his camera for a rifle and joins the Territorial Defence Forces. As war reshapes his life, he moves from storyteller to soldier, documenting fear, loss and resilience amid chaos. Artem Ryzhykov: ‘I never intended to make a film about myself. When the war began, I picked up a camera for the same reason I always had: to observe, to understand, to bear witness. But once I joined the Territorial Defence Forces, the distance between filmmaker and subject disappeared; there was no safe place to stand. I became a soldier not because I was brave, but because I was afraid of doing nothing. The camera stayed with me not as a tool of control, but as a way to remain human inside an inhuman reality. Filming became an act of survival — proof that I was still capable of seeing, feeling and remembering. A Simple Soldier is not about war as spectacle. It is about how war enters a life, reshapes it and leaves behind something fragile, painful and profoundly human.’

From 1980, tens of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees fled war to makeshift camps along the Thai–Cambodian border. Filmed by Taiwan’s Kuangchi Program Service, this documentary captures the peril of foraging in minefields and the resilience of song and dance amid bombardment. The first privately funded Golden Horse Best Documentary, it reshaped Taiwanese documentary discourse. Lee Daw-ming: ‘Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border opens with a military exercise organised by the resistance forces. When we heard it was going to happen, we knew we had to film it — after all, we couldn’t actually go into the battlefield. Military drills don’t wait for you. You have to follow them, film on the move, and capture everything in real time; no one is going to stop while you get the camera ready. Whenever the cinematographer Chen Sung-mao ran after them, I ran alongside him. We were like “conjoined twins”, because my sound had to stay in sync with his images. If he ran, I ran. Whatever he filmed, I had to record the sound; whatever I recorded, he had to have the image.Back then everything was very “hand-crafted”. We decided everything on the spot. There was no way to plan ahead or write a script about what we were going to film. The topic and overall direction were clear, of course, but we had no idea who would become our subject or what we would end up capturing. We just had to react as things happened.’

Following the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan entered democratisation as grassroots movements flourished. Proposed by director Lee Daw-ming and funded by the Public Television Service, the film interviews key figures shaped by the Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement. Intended for broadcast, the film was suppressed by authorities and finally screened at the 2002 Taiwan International Documentary Festival. Lee Daw-ming: ‘Beyond the Anti-DuPont Movement: Portraits of Some Social Activists was filmed while the movement was still ongoing, but I chose not to film the protests themselves, as the Green Team was already covering them. Why repeat what others were already documenting? Besides, I was shooting on film, which made real-time circulation (as they were doing) impossible. I was clear that my aim was to leave a historical record, not to transmit images immediately like television. This is why this film is a “documentary”, not a form of social communication.’

The films of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Media Unit disappeared during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Beirut. Following elusive and contradictory clues, a filmmaker searches for the missing archive, encountering myths and lived stories. With humour, she engages a tragedy she identifies with, questioning its claims while tracing how absence and exile shape memory and who is seen in history. Azza El-Hassan:‘The narrative of dispossession, exile, war, and many other grand narratives of loss have long dominated individual Palestinian lives. The film archive through which Palestinians attempted to document their daily reality and reflect on these grand narratives went missing, and this disappearance became yet another grand narrative of loss to add to the list. Yet within grand narratives, many important details of life are forgotten. This is what Kings and Extras tries to capture: the price of trying not to lose things can be deeply personal and very high, so that you end up forgetting what you have lost while trying to preserve it at the same time.’

After martial law was lifted, decades of industrial pollution ignited social movements across Taiwan. Re-editing material suppressed from broadcast, Lee Daw-ming documents four landmark struggles — from the Hualien pulp mill and Houjin’s fifth naphtha cracker to Tainan pig-farm pollution and the anti-Fourth Nuclear Power Plant campaign — capturing collective resistance and enduring human values of the late 1980s. Lee Daw-ming: ‘During the production of Voice of the People, I made a deliberate choice from the outset to stand on the side of environmental activists. The film centres on them and is made for them; it is very much a social movement documentary. On the surface it appears to give voice to both sides, but this is a false balance, a false neutrality. Official statements are included only as dialectical counter-examples. If this illusion is not dispelled, it becomes difficult to grasp the film’s true intention.In fact my idea was rather simple. From the environmental movements in Taiwan two or three years before making the film, I selected four cases and brought them together to form a map of Taiwan’s environmental problems. My account of real events is biased — but I also make that bias visible, presenting it systematically for the audience to see.’— Excerpted from ‘A Filmmaker Speaking from the Balcony — Also on My Experience of Making Social Movement Documentaries’, Council for Cultural Affairs, Documenting Taiwan: A Bibliography and Anthology of Research and Writings on Taiwanese Documentary Film, June 2000, pp. 346–357.

On 26 October 1929, around 300 women converged from across Palestine and organised a silent demonstration in Jerusalem, travelling in convoy to protest the British High Commissioner’s bias during the Buraq Uprising. Retracing their journey through archival photographs and present-day locations, the film attempts to recover a largely forgotten act of anti-colonial resistance. Mahasen Nasser-Eldin: ‘Being a creative practitioner in documentary film has deepened my understanding of how film can revive meanings of the past within colonised societies, where local narratives have been lost or abandoned by “dominant” histories. In this sense, film may capture representations of history that respond to local, on-the-ground needs for cultural expression that help locate the “missing” within lost knowledge. It also has the potential to foster reflection on how the past is constructed and represented through a lens relevant to the present. I hope this film encourages viewers to explore the interconnectedness of political and historical experience at both local and global levels. It is also a call to consider how we make sense of our shrinking worlds in times of genocide and authoritarianism.’

To dance is to remember and insist on existence. As Palestinian identity faces erasure, dabke becomes an homage to history and culture. The film documents choreography as collective memory, where assembling steps mirrors assembling identity. Film and dance together affirm a love of life, contributing to an archive that keeps Palestine present and alive. Lamees Almakkawy: ‘When we talk about Palestine, it tends to be post-Nakba (the “Catastrophe”, in which at least 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine in 1948, when the State of Israel was established) or in the context of its coloniser. Palestine and Palestinians have become a symbol, rather than a country and a people. We forget that Palestine has a rich culture and history. It is for these reasons that this film tells a story of Palestine through its folk dance, the dabke. Though the dabke is a key component of Palestinian political identity, it is also a reminder that Palestinians exist. Ultimately, this film is a love letter to Palestinians, their resilience, and their insistence on living life.’

Centred on the SaySiyat people’s paSta'ay ritual, this ethnographic documentary records the 1986 Great Ritual in Wufeng, Hsinchu, held once every ten years. Structured around fifteen ritual songs, it explores belief in legendary beings, generational reflection, ambivalence toward tourism, and tensions between tradition and modernisation. Hu Tai-li: ‘The full significance of the paSta'ay remains elusive; my work is only an initial exploration. My interpretations may evolve with further research. I sought to capture the SaySiyat people’s emotions and gestures on screen, leaving ample space for both the audience’s imagination and my own.’— Excerpted and translated from Hu Tai-li, ‘The Projection of Ethnographic Films: With a Discussion of Image Experiments in Taiwan’, Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Vol. 71, 1991. Lee Daw-ming: ‘Actually, before filming Songs of Pasta’ay, I didn’t know much about Taiwan’s Indigenous cultures. I did my homework for this project, but after all Professor Hu Tai-li was the anthropologist. I took part in the discussions, though the structure of the film was largely shaped by her. In the film she asks many questions that sound quite “stupid”. Sometimes she genuinely didn’t know; at other times it was deliberate, because one method in anthropology is to “pretend to know nothing”. By asking seemingly foolish questions, one can check whether one’s understanding truly matches that of the interviewees. Professor Hu researched the paSta'ay songs as we were filming, gradually analysing why the lyrics are repeated in this particular way. Through this “anthropological thesis”, she reinterpreted the paSta'ay songs of the SaySiyat people.’