The 66th edition of the Krakow Film Festival arrives with a wealth of new additions. Following the introduction of Masters in Shorts and Personalities, it’s now time to unveil our latest non-competitive sections. Encounters and Apparitions bring together documentaries that turn their gaze towards the most pressing concerns of contemporary life – social tensions, the climate crisis, violence against nature, the limits of power, and the experiences of formidable women across the globe. These films are bold, emotionally charged and formally distinctive, acclaimed on the festival circuit and widely discussed, while remaining profoundly human: capable of surprising with their perspective, being deeply moving, provoking reflection, and lingering in the mind long after the screening has ended.
Encounters
The intimate lives of Palestinians, climate change, the refugee crisis, and social stories told from unexpected angles — the Encounters section examines contemporary political, ecological, and social realities through the experiences of individuals caught up in far larger historical processes. From the Iraqi capital to migration routes into Europe, from Louisiana to the West Bank and Churchill in northern Canada, these films lead us through a world of tensions, paradoxes, and impossible choices.
Why are young women disappearing in present-day Iraq? This is the question that Zahraa Ghandour sets out to answer in Flana, where the search for a childhood friend becomes a hypnotic journey through Baghdad and an exploration of a largely unspoken social phenomenon. The director portrays a country ravaged by war, families burdened by secrets, and women attempting to break through the fatalism surrounding them. The struggle to preserve one’s own story lies at the heart of A Fox Under a Pink Moon, directed by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhalaghi. Produced entirely remotely and assembled from smartphone footage shot by the teenage Soraya alongside her astonishing artwork, the film traces her escape from Afghanistan through Iran to Europe, placing the experience of migration, domestic violence and forced marriage next to the world of fantasy that enables her to survive.
A different dimension of resistance is shown in For Life, Ahmet Seven’s harrowing film set on the West Bank, where Palestinian women attempt to outmanoeuvre the system in pursuit of motherhood. Hind, whose husband is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison, decides to smuggle sperm from behind bars and pursue IVF treatment. Whether she succeeds becomes the film’s central question.
The personal experience that simultaneously exposes an urgent social and ecological crisis resonates powerfully in Sandra Winther’s Lowland Kids, which introduces us to teenagers from Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana – climate refugees in their own country, forced to abandon their homes as a direct consequence of the environmental devastation caused by oil companies. The climate crisis also returns in Nuisance Bear, directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osioi Vanden, in which a polar bear – symbol of Churchill in Canada, tourist attraction, object of ecological concern, and integral element of Inuit hunters’ traditions – becomes the focal point of numerous conflicts. As climate change forces wild animals ever closer to human settlements, the film leaves us with a disarming question: is the bear really the problem here at all?
Apparitions
The Apparitions section presents contemporary documentary as a space of formal daring, personal risk, and attentive observation of a world in flux. Here one finds a cinephile essay on violence, gender and power; a poetic expedition to Iceland; an intimate encounter with the experience of psychosis; and a family tragicomedy in which domestic conflict reaches an almost operatic register.
In No Mercy, Isa Willinger explores the provocative belief put forward by Ukrainian director Kira Muratova: do women make harsher films than men? Drawing on the work of figures including Céline Sciamma, Alice Diop and Virginie Despentes, Willinger constructs a sharp, audacious cinematic essay on violence, trauma, humiliation, power relations, and the limits of the female gaze. The question of perception returns in a film that takes us into a world that is quite literally disappearing before our eyes. La Pietà, directed by Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés Vilar, ventures to the south of Iceland, to an old house at the foot of Europe’s largest glacier, where archival materials, scientific passion, and extraordinary cinematography of cracking ice compose a poetic lament for a landscape – and time that cannot be held back.
A different form of disintegration, this time internal, shapes The Desert of the Real by Luuk Bouwman, in which individuals living with psychotic disorders invite the viewer into a world of hallucinations, delusions, and fragile attempts to return to reality. The film searches for a visual language capable of expressing liminal mental states, asking whether what we call reality may itself be merely another reassuring fiction. Following these reflections on cinematic perception, nature, and journeys into the self, I Want Her Dead by Gianluca Matarrese leads us into entirely different territory: a Calabrian village where a family feud between two temperamental women has raged for years. The director reconstructs his own family history as a hybrid documentary tragicomedy, in which real people, authentic settings, and staged confrontations combine to produce a story that is, in equal measure, genuinely dramatic and absurdly funny.
The Desert of the Real, dir. Luuk Bouwman, 108’, The Netherlands, 2025
Titles featured in the Encounters section
- A Fox Under a Pink Moon, dir. Mehrdad Oskouei, Soraya Akhalaghi, 77’, Iran, Denmark, 2025
- Flana, dir. Zahraa Ghandour, 87’, Iraq, France, Qatar, 2025
- For Life, dir. Ahmet Seven, 88’, Turkey, Palestine, 2026
- Lowland Kids, dir. Sandra Winther, 94’, USA, 2025
- Nuisance Bear, dir. Jack Weisman, Gabriela Osioi Vanden, 90’, USA, United Kingdom, Canada, 2025
Titles featured in the Apparitions section:
- I Want Her Dead, dir. Gianluca Matarrese, 83’, Italy, Switzerland, 2025
- La Pietà, dir. Pepe Andreu, Rafa Molés Vilar, 82’, Spain, Iceland, Lithuania, 2025
- No Mercy, dir. Isa Willinger, 105’, Germany, Austria, 2025
- The Desert of the Real, dir. Luuk Bouwman, 108’, The Netherlands, 2025
Insider passes for the 66th Krakow Film Festival are now on sale!
The Krakow Film Festival is on the exclusive list of film events qualifying for the Academy Awards® in short film categories (fiction, animation, documentary) and feature-length documentary, the European Film Awards in the same categories, and serves as a qualifying event for the BAFTA Awards.
The Krakow Film Festival is organised with financial support from the City of Krakow, the Polish Film Institute, the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state purpose fund. The Polish Filmmakers Association serves as co-organiser.
The 66th Krakow Film Festival will be held in cinemas from 31 May to 7 June 2027 and online on KFF VOD from 5 June to 19 June 2026.