The festival opens on 16 November under the motto “Seeing is believing?” The question carries particular weight in an era of AI-generated videos, deepfakes and manipulated photographs. A documentary is never a neutral imprint of what happened in front of the camera. The filmmaker chooses the viewpoint, the frame and the context in which an event reaches the audience.
According to We Love Budapest’s festival preview published on 4 November, this year’s 80-film programme explores the ways cameras shape our understanding of reality. The theme also has a place in film history: the concept of “documentary value” was first used in relation to cinema in 1926.
Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă’s short film Shot/Countershot places photographs taken by an American journalist in communist Romania alongside secret surveillance images of him from the Securitate archives. The same man and historical period appear through two radically different gazes.
Film essayist Mark Cousins will attend the festival in person. Hungarian audiences will see four episodes from his 16-hour series The Story of Documentary Film for the first time. Drawing on more than a century of moving images, the series examines how filmmakers have tried to understand the world through the camera.
Family stories become social portraits
The festival opens at Trafó in Budapest on 16 November with Attila Ponczók’s Papa. Winner of the best documentary award at the Hungarian Film Festival, the film follows the director as he tries to find a home for his quick-tempered grandfather. Their personal situation reveals broader difficulties in Hungary’s elderly care system and patriarchal patterns passed down through generations.
Papa also forms part of this year’s Roma strand. Verzió is devoting particular attention to films showing the diversity of Roma communities and to work by Roma filmmakers.
Olivér Márk Tóth’s It Was Beautiful This Way follows Marcell Szirmai, better known as rapper Pogány Induló, over three years. Filming began well before his arena concerts, allowing the camera to capture both his dramatic rise and the price of sudden success. The production won the Golden Hejnał Award at the Krakow Film Festival. Previously released as a four-part HBO series, the story will be shown at Verzió in feature-length form.
Bakpakk, the first documentary by journalist Kitti Fődi, follows 14 teenagers for nine months. Many had experienced years of exclusion and failure within the school system. The film observes what happens when they are finally given time, attention and trust.
Sára Timár’s first feature-length documentary, Beneath Us It Beats, investigates the history of a Budapest villa where she spent part of her childhood. During Hungary’s communist dictatorship, its cellar was used to detain defendants in show trials in secret. What begins as an exploration of family memory leads to a hidden site of historical repression.
In Máté Bartha’s If You Want to Be a Poet, Attila Bertók works to preserve the literary legacy of his father, the award-winning Hungarian poet László Bertók, who died in 2020. At the same time, he must find his own place in the shadow of that inheritance. Ákos K. Kovács’s Theatre from Mud reunites György Hernyák and Frigyes Kovács, the two founders of the travelling Tanyaszínház theatre in Vojvodina, for the company’s 45th anniversary.
Award-winning films from around the world
The international selection includes films honoured at Cannes, Sundance and Tribeca. Imago, named best documentary at Cannes, follows a Chechen man returning from exile and building a house, using his story to explore identity and the search for home.
Filmed over ten years, One in a Million follows a Syrian girl and her family from Syria to Germany and back again. The film won two awards at Sundance. Another Sundance prize-winner, To Hold the Mountains, portrays a mother and daughter fighting for their land in the mountains of Montenegro.
Amazománia documents the reunion between a Brazilian rainforest community and a Western photographer who had photographed its members years earlier. Meanwhile in Namibia examines how the legacy of German colonial rule remains present in everyday life. Soldiers of Light looks at the role that online communities, wellness influencers and lifestyle gurus can play in the radicalisation of young people searching for direction.
Maasja Ooms’s Voices in My Head follows five people who hear voices. During an unusual course of therapy, psychiatrist Dirk Corstens speaks directly with those voices as well as with his patients. Festival audiences will also have an opportunity to meet Corstens.
Blood and Mud investigates the links between coltan mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the global electronics industry. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Melting follows the disappearance of snow and ice from Japan to Antarctica. Other films address subjects that remain difficult to discuss openly, including abortion, euthanasia, menopause, wartime sexual violence and changing ideas of masculinity.
The closing film, Crocodile, tells the story of The Critics, a young filmmaking collective from Kaduna, Nigeria. The group began shooting science-fiction films with a single phone and homemade sets, teaching themselves visual effects along the way. Their work eventually attracted attention in Hollywood.
Screenings designed for different needs
Many screenings will be accompanied by discussions with filmmakers, participants and experts. The programme also includes afternoon, cultural and musical events, along with an expanded student section. Beyond the cinemas, Centrális Galéria and the Budapest campus of CEU will serve as festival venues.
Four films will have SDH subtitles, which identify sound effects and other audible information as well as dialogue. Selected screenings of Papa and Beneath Us It Beats will include Hungarian audio description.
A relaxed screening will be held at the weekend, with dimmed lighting, lower volume and greater freedom of movement for viewers who may find a traditional cinema environment difficult. Childcare will also be available for parents of young children, with the involvement of ELTE’s Faculty of Primary and Pre-School Education.
The 23rd Verzió runs from 16 to 25 November in Budapest and in Pécs, Szeged, Szombathely, Veszprém, Miskolc, Debrecen, Kecskemét and Szolnok. Sensitive content and accessible screenings will be clearly marked in the programme.
Source: We Love Budapest
