The International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) returns to Geneva from 6–15 March 2026 with an edition explicitly shaped by the instability of «the real» as a civic category. Set against what the festival describes as rising #fascism alongside geopolitical, environmental, social, and technological upheaval, the 24th FIFDH positions cinema as both an evidentiary practice and a site where perception is constructed, contested, and sometimes staged.
While the edition’s visual identity is anchored by a poster diptych drawn from British photographer and filmmaker Zed Nelson’s long-term series The Anthropocene Illusion, the festival’s curatorial emphasis is squarely on how moving-image forms, documentary and fiction alike, metabolise a world of proliferating screens and fragmented information. Nelson’s work, produced over six years across four continents, is framed as a critique of contemporary spectatorship and the «sanitised» image-world that can replace lived experience. He will also join the 2026 International Jury alongside author and playwright Sarah Schulman, filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi, director Sandhya Suri, programmer Jenny Billeter, and author Adania Shibli.
On the film programme’s public-facing spine, FIFDH will open with A Fox Under a Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi, described as a portrait of a young Afghan artist on the run, navigating the uncertainties and hazards of attempting to reach Europe. The closing slot pivots into surreal fiction with Swiss filmmaker Jacqueline Zünd’s Don’t Let the Sun, set in an overheated dystopia where humans live by night, and where solitude becomes a political condition as much as a private one. The film is scheduled for theatrical release on 18 March 2026, extending the festival’s narrative beyond the event itself and into distribution.
A major institutional signal this year is FIFDH’s new partnership with The Guardian Documentaries, marking a decade of the outlet’s documentary work focused on underrepresented human stories and a hybrid of visual language with journalistic method. A dedicated screening will present three emblematic shorts: Laurence Topham’s My Brother’s Keeper, Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s We Did Not Consent, and Tom Silverstone’s Give Me Shelter. The collaboration also extends into #Impact Days# via a panel featuring Lindsay Poulton (Editorial Director, Film & TV) and other international professionals, and into the festival’s Schools Programme with Ornella Mutoni’s The Things We Don’t Say.
Beyond anglophone media, FIFDH inaugurates a collaboration with feminist outlet La Déferlante through a Forum dedicated to unpaid labour, using the topic as a lever for rethinking trade union struggle. The festival also renews its partnership with Blast, spotlighting Yanis Mhamdi’s Alice au pays des colons, which follows the everyday resistance of a Palestinian family confronting settler violence in the West Bank.
The full programme will be unveiled on 12 February. A press conference is scheduled the same day at 11:00 at Fonction:Cinéma in Geneva.
