Modern Times Review

08/06/2026

Krakow Film Festival still runs online until 19 June.

The 66th Krakow Film Festival has announced its winners, with Swiss documentary Tristan Forever, directed by Tobias Nölle and Loran Bonnardot, taking the Golden Horn in the International Documenta…

07/06/2026

Having kicked off today, one of Italy's finest documentary festivals, Biografilm Festival runs through 18 June.

Find all MTR coverage -> https://www.moderntimes.review/tag/biografilm/

04/06/2026

The 28th edition of Encounters South African International Documentary Festival kicks off today and runs through 14 June at venues across Cape Town and Johannesburg.

We're very happy to once again have special film reviews from the young critics at Durban FilmMart SA, covering the extensive regional features and shorts.

Find all MTR coverage -> https://www.moderntimes.review/tag/encounters-sa/

02/06/2026

A beach in Texas. Children playing in the water. Birdsong thinning out. Rockets lifting off. 'Shifting Baselines' keeps these things in the same frame until the whole idea of progress starts to rot from within.

Now screening at the 2026 Krakow Film Festival, Director Julien Elie films a desaturated world in which damage has become background texture, while private ambition still calls itself the «future».

TECH: The fantasy of interplanetary escape curdles into a black-and-white requiem for a damaged Earth.

28/05/2026

«We want to be an event where… valuable, long-lasting creative professional friendships are forged, resulting in extraordinary films»

As KFF Industry returns to Krakow Film Festival in 2026, Katarzyna Wilk discusses the movement between Polish documentary, international festival circuits, Ukrainian projects, and the long-term relationships that allow films to travel beyond recognition alone.

KRAKOW FF: As KFF Industry returns to Krakow in 2026, Katarzyna Wilk discusses the movement between Polish documentary, international festival circuits, Ukrainian projects ,and the long-term relat…

26/05/2026

Archives are everywhere now. In documentaries, museums, biennales, academic discourse, and political argument. Yet Truls Lie asks a harder question in his essay from the 2026 Thessaloniki International Film Festival Documentary Festival. Do archives still matter the way we want them to?

This essay moves from war ruins and old photographs to Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and the contemporary crisis of interpretation. The real issue is no longer preservation alone. It is whether images can still cut through chaos before they are absorbed into overload, spectacle, or numbness.

ARCHIVES: Why do we have a feverish, compulsive, repetitive desire to return to the origin – to preserve archives and collections? And how do art and film festivals using archives influence our in…

25/05/2026

As John Carpenter's 'They Live' has proven, when you put on the glasses, the billboards change.

Our critic John Hawkins uses the prophetic sci-fi classic to get at what David Sirota is doing in 'Master Plan.' In the second season of his acclaimed podcast, Sirota is not explaining one outrage at a time, but training the listener to recognise a governing pattern that stretches from Nixon and the Powell Memo through Reagan, Citizens United, Snowden, and the immunity doctrine handed down in Trump v. United States in July 2024.

POLITICS: A Review of the Master Plan Podcast, Season 2: The Kingmakers

20/05/2026

A survivor returns years later and asks everyone else to account for themselves.

Daniela Magnani Hüller's 'Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Party' does not stop at the figure of the attacker. It widens the frame until attempted femicide becomes inseparable from the atmosphere that allowed it to gather force.

After premiering in the Berlinale Forum / Forum Expanded, the film went on to win the megaherz Student Award at DOK.fest München 2026.

A survivor of attempted femicide returns to the people around her past, asking what they saw, what they missed, and what silence still protects.

20/05/2026

Encounters South African International Documentary Festival will return in June with one of its most internationally visible lineups in recent years to audiences in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Encounters South African International Documentary Festival will return in June with one of its most internationally visible lineups in recent years, bringing Oscar-tipped titles, major festival w…

19/05/2026

Presented earlier this month at the Eurocine Festival, the Hungarian film industry proposal demands a new Film Act and reform of the National Film Institute, among others

Hungary’s film community is no longer speaking in the polite language of sectoral adjustment. Filmreform2026, a new initiative backed by major industry bodies, creative organisations and film scho…