The Olive Tree

A love letter from a young mother to her daughter, the film tells the story of Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, Syria as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. Her camera captures incredible stories of loss, laughter and survival as Waad wrestles with an impossible choice– whether or not to flee the city to protect her daughter’s life, when leaving means abandoning the struggle for freedom for which she has already sacrificed so much.

This revealing documentary honors the legendary Sidney Poitier—iconic actor, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Featuring interviews with Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Halle Berry, and more.

An intimate portrait of the small shops and shopkeepers of the Rue Daguerre in Paris, a picturesque street that has been the filmmaker’s home for more than 50 years.

A subjective documentary that explores various theories about hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's classic film The Shining. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments.

Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

In the Realms of the Unreal is a documentary about the reclusive Chicago-based artist Henry Darger. Henry Darger was so reclusive that when he died his neighbors were surprised to find a 15,145-page manuscript along with hundreds of paintings depicting The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glodeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Cased by the Child Slave Rebellion.

An on-the-scene documentary following the events of September 11, 2001 from an insider's view, through the lens of two French filmmakers who simply set out to make a movie about a rookie NYC fireman and ended up filming the tragic event that changed our lives forever.

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia.

Climate is changing. Instead of showing all the worst that can happen, this documentary focuses on the people suggesting solutions and their actions.

Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.

This documentary revisits the French football team's controversial 2010 World Cup and the bus strike that sparked global headlines and national outrage.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

This special explores the return of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to the screen, as well as Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen to their classic roles. Director Deborah Chow leads the cast and crew as they create new heroes and villains that live alongside new incarnations of beloved Star Wars characters, and an epic story that dramatically bridges the saga films.

A documentary about ten very different lives connected by having appeared onscreen wearing masks or helmets in Star Wars.

An unprecedented and intimate look at the life, work and enduring legacy of British actress Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993).

For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood's most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors, has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.

Witness the never-before-seen footage and true story behind the John Wick phenomenon – from independent film to billion-dollar franchise.

In 1997, Louis Theroux made a documentary about the world of male porn performers in Los Angeles. 15 years later, he returns to find a business struggling with the deluge of free porn on the internet. Louis revisits some of the original programme's contributors as well as meeting the latest crop of porn performers dreaming of porn stardom.

In May 1974, the Israeli Air Force carried out an extermination operation against the Palestinian refugee camp Nabatiyeh. With this as a starting point, it is reviewed how the last 50 years of Zionist colonization of Palestine have partly led to the establishment of the state of Israel, partly to the expulsion of a people, the Palestinians, from their land. The film shows scenes of daily life in Palestinian refugee camps. We hear various of the inhabitants talk about their desire to return to their country, and we follow how the resistance movement works to free women from their traditional backward role. At the same time, the emergence of the armed resistance struggle is analysed, and the significance of the latest military technological developments for guerilla wars in the 3rd world is explained.

Amos Gitai returns to the occupied territories for the first time since his 1982 documentary FIELD DIARY. WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai's film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.

Going behind the usual images of war-torn Gaza, Swiss documentarian Nicolas Wadimoff offers this look at how people survive despite constant threat of danger. Children still play, rappers still create music and families still love one another. In addition to visiting the United Nations Food Distribution Center, Wadimoff films at a derelict amusement park and profiles the DARG TeaM rappers, whose politically charged music proclaims their defiance.

A video project meant to highlight the human cost in Palestine.

Guy Hircefeld, a veteran who served in the Israeli military at the start of its occupation of Palestine in the 1980s, now fights against the Israeli occupation. His only weapon is a camera.

Structured in chapters, the film moves from the aftermath of the 1967 war to mass demonstrations and training grounds, where men, women, and children practice survival and resistance. The camera’s proximity, switching between black-and-white and colour, treats cinema as witness, archive, and rallying cry.

"Gaza Is Our Home" is a profoundly personal documentary that peels back the layers of devastation within the Gaza Strip, as witnessed through the lens of filmmaker Monear Shaer. His debut documentary was created out of agony as a timely, impactful, and tragic response to the collective anguish of all who call Gaza home... What began as an auto-generated slideshow on Monear’s iPhone of his own trip to see his family in 2021, has since transformed into a feature-length documentary. Through a tapestry of intimate interviews, unfiltered personal footage, and raw storytelling, "Gaza Is Our Home" transcends the political rhetoric and confronts audiences with the agonizing reality and ongoing cruelty thrust upon the film-makers own family. It is more than just a documentary... Rather, "Gaza Is Our Home" stands as a testament to the humanity behind the over 33,362 innocent lives massacred since Oct 2023...

A documentary of Palestinian children that lived through the Israeli military's intervention in the Gaza Strip in late 2008. The film depicts how the children of the Samuni family, that lost 29 members in the conflict, have accepted the deaths of their loved ones and how they try to overcome.

Since 9/11, the Israeli arms industries are doing bigger business than ever before. Large Israeli companies develop and test the vessels of future warfare, which is then sold worldwide by private Israeli agents, who manipulate a network of Israeli politicians and army commanders, while Israeli theoreticians explain to various foreign countries how to defeat civil and para-military resistance. All based on the extensive Israeli experience.The film reveals The Lab, which has transformed the Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank from a burden to a marketable, highly profitable, national asset.

In 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Gazala purchased land in western Ohio, on which sits a disused school building. This site allowed her to explore her complex relationship with “the land.” As the daughter of displaced indigenous Palestinians, she attempts to form a proxy bond with the earth, on ground that was stolen from the displaced indigenous Shawnee people. Closeness to the Land is video footage of hand-painted text signs that translate the word الأرض (ard) into six English words, displayed performatively in multiple locations to capture the now-invisible nature of indigenous culture in Ohio. These signs were installed on the old schoolhouse in early 2021.

The film follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.

A Bunch of Questions with No Answers (2025) is a 23-hour film by artists Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn. Compiled entirely from questions posed by journalists at U.S. State Department press briefings between October 3, 2023, and the end of the Biden administration, the work removes the officials’ answers, leaving only the unresolved demands for clarity and accountability.

With the most tech startups and venture capital per capita in the world, Israel has long been hailed as The Startup Nation. WIRED’s feature-length documentary looks beyond Tel Aviv’s vibrant, liberal tech epicenter to the wider Holy Land region – the Palestinian territories, where a parallel Startup Nation story is emerging in East Jerusalem, Nazareth, Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank, as well as in the Israeli cybersecurity hub of Be’er Sheva. And we will learn how the fertile innovation ecosystem of Silicon Wadi has evolved as a result of its unique political, geographical and cultural situation and explore the future challenges – and solutions – these nations are facing.

A thought-provoking documentary on the current and historical causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. political involvement.

Assassinated Lebanese intellectual Mahdi Amel — often dubbed “the Arab Gramsci” — famously said: “He who resists is never defeated.” What use is his thought to us today, and what is our responsibility as image makers to Gaza?

A leading figure in the Palestinian cause and the fight against imperialism, the Lebanese communist activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah had been languishing in French prisons for thirty-eight years—a unique case in France. Arrested in Lyon in 1984 with false papers, he was sentenced two years later to four years in prison for possession of weapons and explosives, then in 1987 received a life sentence for complicity in the assassinations in Paris five years earlier of an Israeli Mossad agent and an American military attaché—charges he has always denied. Although he has been eligible for release since 1999, French political authorities, under pressure from the United States and Israel, opposed his release. Interventions by Palestinian figures, his relatives, his lawyer and ex-prisoners from the extreme left, retrace the journey of the village schoolteacher who became an anti-colonial activist.

Poetry is everywhere, even in the refugee camps where absolute misery reigns. In front of old plastic advertising posters on which are drawn in giant format the big icons of luxury and consumerism that make up their shelters, refugee children stand like kings. Symbols of life at the heart of war, fragility, and death, these children are shown by Jocelyne Saab as precious notes of hope in the heart of a dehumanized world. One Dollar a Day was filmed in the Syrian refugee camps of the Bekaa plain, Lebanon in 2015, with text by Etel Adnan.

Cheikh Djemaï looks back on the genesis of Gillo Pontecorvo’s feature film, The Battle of Algiers (1965). Through archive images, extracts from the film and interviews with personalities, the filmmaker retraces the journey of a major work - from the events of the Algiers Casbah (1956-1957) to the presentation of the Lion of 'Or causing the anger of the French delegation in Venice - which left its mark as much in the history of cinema as in that of Algeria.

The Israeli filmmaker Shai Corneli Polak records the building of the 'security wall' through Palestinian territory at the village of Bil'in. The villagers protest mostly peacefully, while the Israeli army doesn't react peacefully. By now the Israeli High Court has ruled that the building of the wall was illegal.

The film returns to the origins of the creation of the State of Israel (from 1896 to 1948) and highlights the responsibility of the Western World.