The 28th edition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival will take place from 5 to 15 March 2026, opening its programme with a first slate that foregrounds artistic legacy, cultural memory, and the porous boundary between public image and private life. The festival has also unveiled its official poster, created by Greek visual artist Alexandros Psychoulis, marking the beginning of this year’s announcements.
Psychoulis’ poster reimagines the industrial cranes of the Port of Thessaloniki as both personal and cinematic symbols. Drawing on his childhood memories of the port of Volos, the artist likens the cranes’ mechanical gesture to the documentary act itself, extracting fragments of reality and suspending them before the viewer. Known for his pioneering work in interactive digital art and his participation in the 47th Venice Biennale, Psychoulis brings a conceptual continuity between documentary practice and contemporary visual art to the festival’s visual identity.
The first announced titles form a loosely connected constellation of films dedicated to major cultural figures, each approached through formally distinct documentary strategies. Filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard present Broken English, an intimate and hybrid portrait of Marianne Faithfull. Developed with Faithfull’s involvement before her death, the film blends archival material with fictionalised elements, guided by performances from Tilda Swinton and George MacKay, to form a reflective meditation on memory, contradiction, and reinvention.
Another portrait, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, revisits the life of Kim Novak, tracing her retreat from Hollywood fame to a self-fashioned life of artistic autonomy in rural Oregon. Drawing on rare archival footage, the film reframes her iconic collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock as a lens through which questions of image and identity continue to resonate.
Writer Irvine Welsh is the subject of Reality Is Not Enough by Paul Sng, an unconventional portrait that situates artistic creation within altered states of consciousness and contemporary political unease. Readings by figures such as Nick Cave and Liam Neeson extend the film’s cultural reach beyond literature.
The festival also revisits the archive of the late filmmaker Howard Brookner with newly restored screenings of Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars and Nova ’78. The former documents theatre innovator Robert Wilson during the creation of an ambitious opera project, while the latter captures the historic 1978 Nova Convention, a gathering that brought together William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Glass.
