Sarajevo Film Festival 2024

Nick Holdsworth

Our regular critic. Journalist, writer, author. Works mostly from Central and Eastern Europe and Russia.
mail

Tolstoy, trenches, and tragedy

CONFLICT: If truth is the first casualty of war, then Gregory Carleton argues that truth as an ideal in covering conflict was born during a war fought in Ukraine nearly two centuries ago.
Nick Holdsworth -

The war remains

UKRAINE: Collateral damage far from the frontlines of Ukraine's long struggle in the east with separatists and now Russian armed forces is seen in Lesia Diak's moving focus on a family torn apart by war.
Nick Holdsworth -

Survival and solidarity on Serbia’s polluted frontline

LABOUR: The eponymous collectors of plastic waste are just another slice of human history in Nemanja Vojinovic's Bottlemen.
Nick Holdsworth -

The secret battle between Russia and the West

RUSSIA: Russian President Vladimir Putin blames the West for the war in Ukraine, but as Putin's Playground shows, the Kremlin has been subverting the west to suit its own agenda for years.
Nick Holdsworth -

Victory Day

RUSSIA: Victory Day in Russia in 2022 – barely six weeks after Putin's invasion of Ukraine – plays out the same tired old themes of the Red Army's victory over Nazism in 1945, with those celebrating eagerly taking up the new propaganda of victory.
Nick Holdsworth -

The solitary path

SPIRITUALITY: The transformation from renowned HIV researcher to Buddhist monk unveils complexities of solitude, mental health, and familial reconciliation.
Nick Holdsworth -

The unflinching eye

Cataloguing the horrors of the war in Ukraine becomes an obsessive search for the last perfect picture to crown an award-winning career for Dutch war photographer Eddy van Wessel.
Nick Holdsworth -

The law and the lost

IMMIGRATION: Borders are all in the mind, Loretta van Horst's powerful film about US border patrol officers trying to stop people smuggling from Mexico, The Border Crossed Us, shows.
Nick Holdsworth -

Against the tide

RUSSIA: Askold Kutov's compelling documentary Of Caravan and the Dogs details the final destruction of independent voices in Putin's Russia that oppose his war on Ukraine.
Nick Holdsworth -
Load more

Latest

Sofia Documental 2024: The complete winners

Modern Times Review -
The fifth edition of the #Sofia DocuMental# International Film Festival, held from 28 September to 6 October 2024, celebrated human rights-focused documentary cinema with...

Modern Times Review -

Modern Times Review -

Lynching the vote in America, again

John Hawkins -
ELECTIONS: Investigative journalist Greg Palast connects voter suppression in the U.S. to historical vigilantism.

Ji.hlava IDFF announces full 2024 programme

Modern Times Review -
The 28th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival will run from 25 October to 3 November 2024, marking its first ten-day iteration. The festival's programme...

We can be found at all the primary European documentary festivals, on-site for audiences, and in the delegate bags of professionals. Printed two times annually and with regularly updated online content, our archive of nearly 2000 reviews and articles cover political, ecological, big-tech and existential documentary films – and now non-fiction books too. Please donate and you will get the print magazine too.

DONATE

© FILM AS / Truls Lie
96100 Siracusa, Italy 
Editor-in-chief: Truls Lie

Sign up for NEWSLETTER

X