The 30th Ji.hlava IDFF runs from 23 October to 1 November 2026. The anniversary edition centres on Films That Changed the World, a section of thirteen titles whose effects reached past the cinema into legislation, public debate and the way a given issue was understood. Selections span Edward R. Murrow and David Lowe’s Harvest of Shame (1960), Kurt Goldberger’s Children Without Love (1963), Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967), Chris Marker and Mario Marret’s Be Seeing You (1968), Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971), Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003). Twenty-two months after Harvest of Shame aired, President Kennedy signed the Migrant Health Act, while evidence gathered during the making of The Thin Blue Line helped reopen proceedings that led to the overturning of Randall Dale Adams’s conviction in 1989. The festival’s visual identity this year takes up the motif of a circle spreading into waves. The section is supported by Jan Barta’s Pale Fire Capital.
Festival director Marek Hovorka framed the anniversary around the status of the documentary image under generative AI tools, arguing that viewers will need to redefine what they expect of documentary truthfulness. «Documentary cinema is thus reaching a turning point, and how it responds to these new challenges will be crucial,» he said.
A retrospective devoted to Vietnamese-American filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha includes her debut Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1982) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). Three decades of the festival itself are gathered in Ji.hlava 30: Thinking Through Film, an archival essay by Andrea Slováková with editor Janka Vlčková, assembled from close to one hundred hours of footage and premiering in six chapters of roughly ten minutes, which also screen separately before selected programmes. Jørgen Leth, Wiseman, Deborah Stratman, Béla Tarr, Viktor Kossakovsky and editor Claire Atherton are among the voices featured. «One of the strongest impressions that comes from working with the archive is therefore a renewed awareness of the uniqueness of a festival as an encounter,» Slováková said.
New work includes Eliška Cílková’s Up Again and Filip Remunda’s Love Exposed in Czech Joy, and Sára Prokopová’s Retuning as a Special Screening. International titles feature Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Kossakovsky’s Trillion, Rithy Panh’s We Are the Fruits of the Forest and Zainab Entezar’s 771 Days. A FAMU 80 selection marks eight decades of the Prague film school through early works by Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel and Helena Třeštíková.
The Inspiration Forum organises its days around the map, humour and power, closing on the premise that current arrangements are not fixed. David Wengrow appears alongside Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture, climate researcher and comedian Matt Winning, and political theorist Camila Vergara. The Industry programme expects more than 1,200 accredited guests and some 800 individual meetings across four days, with Montenegro as Country in Focus and the Emerging Producers 2027 cohort introduced.
