Abdallah Al-Khatib, Beaucoup Parle, Berlinale 2026, Chronicles From the Siege, Crocodile, If Pigeons Turned to Gold, Kristina Mikhailova, Marie Wilke, Pascale Bodet, Pepa Lubojacki, pietra brettkelly, River Dreams, Scenario
Before the Berlinale announced its official selection, it presented a remarkable retrospective entitled Lost in the 90s. Spanning wide geographies, with particular emphasis on narratives surrounding the Soviet collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it brought together an eclectic cohort of documentaries and fiction—from Farocki and Godard to an underscreened Belarusian doc Orange Vests and the first fiction feature on the Chornobyl catastrophe Collapse.
Such a politically charged program of films by formally daring directors with an activist spirit could serve as an inspiring point of departure for the festival to adopt an openly political rhetoric. More precisely, to articulate clear support for Palestine, a point of contention among its audience since the 2024 edition, when calls to condemn Israel’s actions were first ignored by the festival. Hopes for change this year were once again dashed after the now notorious opening jury press conference, spiraling into a loop of cautious statements and compromising speeches.
Disillusioned by Wim Wenders’s remark that cinema should supposedly remain outside politics, many attendees reacted with visible unease. This reached an awkward climax during the closing ceremony, during which several awardees made pro-Palestine speeches that were subsequently denounced by German officials. In this dispiriting environment, where an uninspiring main competition unfolded alongside the presence of a human-sized purple Labubu and a BRATcha bar stand near the Berlinale Palast, I found consolation in the documentaries of the Forum sidebar. Dedicated to political and experimental cinema, this year’s Forum expectedly proved to be the right place to encounter ideologically daring and formally inventive gems.
A distinctly Farockian spirit runs through Scenario—arguably the most political documentary of the edition—precisely because its oxymoronic premise exposes the logic of contemporary German (if not European as a whole) defence politics. In her third feature, Marie Wilke adopts an observational approach as a tool of critical inquiry inside Europe’s largest military training ground, where war is actively researched, rehearsed, and reflected. Wilke’s static camera lingers in long takes on the flamboyant rehearsals of combat choreography, then shifts to looser close-ups of civilian visitors curiously and anxiously absorbing the information.
Scenario’s masterful editing draws on footage shot over the course of a year to construct a portrait that captures both the scale and versatility of this institution. Wilke is particularly attentive to the historical discourses that surface when Bundeswehr troops deliver moral lessons about Germany’s Nazi past, which prompts a productive reflection on the circular ontology of war. In this light, the familiar postwar thesis of “never again” begins to sound uncertain and may have prompted the nervous laughter heard during public screenings. The primarily playful nature of the military training ground, combined with its pedantic assurance that such a manufactured system can prepare one for war, appears increasingly and uncomfortably naïve, given that Russian drones are becoming frequent guests at NATO’s borders.
Another form of political immersion through the national landscape is offered in River Dreams by Kazakh director Kristina Mikhailova. Taking the banks of the Aksay River as a symbolic axis, the director records a series of talking head interviews with teenagers, activists, and artists, assembling a collective portrait of the contemporary Kazakh woman. Their reflections reveal a depressingly misogynistic culture, as they recall banned feminist marches and the overall impunity surrounding gender-based violence. River Dreams also allows an anti-colonial glimpse to surface—for instance, in the rare presence of the Kazakh language onscreen. Much like the river itself, these voices stubbornly flow through obstacles, forming an urgent activist force.
What proves most impressive about River Dreams is the very context of its existence. As the first Kazakh film to compete at the Berlinale, its birth was quite a struggle. While their domestic industry actively generates low-brow genre films, festival ambitions remain unprioritized, let alone documentary filmmaking. Despite winning national pitching, the promised funding was lost within murky bureaucratic schemes, and opportunities for European co-production were severely limited. Fortunately, the film’s social justice slant extended into its own production conditions: over a lengthy development period, Mikhailova and her producer Dana Sabitova laid the groundwork for new industry connections and launched the initiative Women Make Docs, which has already achieved an unprecedented level of international visibility for Kazakhstan’s documentary sector.
A fierce struggle against bureaucracy becomes the central subject in Beaucoup Parle by film director and former film critic Pascale Bodet, as she follows an Egyptian-born man struggling through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of French immigration law. Adopting a vérité-like approach, Bodet pictures Amr Hanafy, an undocumented man who has lived and worked in a Parisian bakery for the past 17 years. One of Amr’s central struggles is his imperfect French—eloquently mirrored in the film’s title—a symptom of his mental block before the foggy prospect of legalization. The immersively modest camera follows Amr across Parisian terraces where cigarette smoke fills the frame, or into dimly lit lawyer’s offices, and through these casual observations the film assumes a charmingly tragicomic tone.
In a sense, Beaucoup Parle unfolds as a productive exchange between Amr and Pascale, a deal in which everyone benefits: the former receives linguistic assistance during phone calls as well as invaluable speaking practice in routine chats, while the latter gains a sharply contemporary and internationally resonant subject embodied in an irresistibly charismatic protagonist. Their personal dynamic is equally compelling. Pascale frequently corrects Amr’s grammatical slips or poses seemingly banal questions on how exhausted he is. Yet in these exchanges, their privilege gap becomes palpable, granting Amr additional authority over his own story—and the broader migrant perspective.
Pietra Brettkelly was also lucky to document unusually prolific protagonists. Crocodile offers a curious portrait of The Critics, a group of young Nigerian filmmakers emerging from YouTube deep cuts. The Critics are known for their spectacular and fearlessly low-budget sci-fi films, in which everything, from little sisters to stray props to the apocalyptic landscape of their surroundings, is folded into dizzyingly inventive diegetic worlds.
Montaging excerpts from more than fifty short films produced over the past 13 years and remotely-conducted interviews, Brettkelly manages to transmit their infectious bravado and growing success— the latter largely arriving from abroad. During its 100-minute runtime, the film strains in its focus on the groups’ intricate social conditions. Brettkelly accentuates the growth of their political awareness, offering a reading of their sci-fi obsession as an escapist search for solace amid chronic power outages, community scepticism, and the unrest surrounding the EndSARS protests. Where the film succeeds most is in capturing the creative trajectory of The Critics. Their focus is less on professionalism measured against Western standards than on the creative refinement of their own understanding of filmmaking—sincere zeal that no budget can manufacture.
My Forum favorite If Pigeons Turned to Gold—formally scandalous and striking in its psychological depth—comes from Czech debutant Pepa Lubojacki, a recent FAMU graduate who also won the festival’s main documentary award. Beginning production over five years ago, Lubojacki’s film seeks to excavate the roots of her intergenerational addiction struggle: her deceased father, her cousins, and, above all, her older homeless brother, whose fate Pepa is inexorably drawn toward by a relentless but futile desire to help. The vicious cycle, compounded by a pressing sense of shame, becomes an inexhaustible creative source for Lubojacki.
Pigeons adopts a narcotic mode, assembling a kaleidoscopic narration through AI-animated photographs, iPhone-shot documentation, graphic intertitles, absurd synth-infused beats, and wordplay bordering on nonsense. Such a multimedia arsenal is unleashed across two hours of chaos, fusing childlike playfulness with an adult seriousness. The film’s flow undulates the effects of psychoactive substances, at times erupting into hysterical flux, at others receding into moments of teary observation. Lubojacki avoids the risk inherent to addiction-themed films, which so often collapse into moralizing didacticism. Instead, their film openly admits the absence of any clear answer for how to live with and cope with such a complicated disease. It is precisely within this torrent of disordered consciousness, this abundance of expression unashamed of its experimental and emotional excess, that the director’s subjectivity finds its most lucid cinematic form.
The only thing I regret is not catching Abdallah Al-Khatib’s Chronicles From the Siege from the Perspectives program, an Algerian-French-Palestinian docu-fiction hybrid about survival in a war zone. Al-Khatib’s speech at the closing ceremony, upon winning the section’s top prize, was precisely the kind of statement that festival leadership avoided: “I will say my final word to German government: you are partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel. I believe you are intelligent enough to recognize this truth, but you choose to not care. Free Palestine, from now until the end of the world.”
Source: filmmakermagazine.com