DOK.fest München closed its 41st edition with a winners list that underlined documentary cinema’s continuing turn toward questions of structural responsibility, from global finance and colonial memory to migration, illness and labour. The festival awarded €64,200 across its competitions and partner prizes, with the three VIKTORIA awards anchoring the 2026 honours.

Bernard Weber and Martin Schilt’s The Narrative won the VIKTORIA DOK.international Main Competition. Centred on former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli, the film revisits one of the Swiss bank’s largest financial scandals, using long-term observation and staged reconstruction to challenge the media and institutional story that turned Adoboli into an individual emblem of systemic failure.

In the DOK.deutsch Competition, Jonas Spriestersbach’s Meanwhile in Namibia took the VIKTORIA for its examination of German colonial afterlives in Namibia, where “living museums” and development projects expose unresolved questions of genocide, land, reparations and memory. The DOK.horizonte award went to Unwelcomed by Sebastián González and Amílcar Infante, a formally rigorous account of Venezuelan migration into Chile and the xenophobic violence encountered along the route.

The megaherz Student Award was presented to Daniela Magnani Hüller’s Was an Empfindsamkeit bleibt, with Liam Erlach’s First Lap Crash receiving a special mention. Lena Karbe’s Inner Emigrants won the VFF Documentary Production Award, while Driving Europe, directed by Felix Länge and produced by Lennart Heidtmann, Länge and Artur Althen, received the VFF talent production prize for its portrait of exploited Georgian and Azerbaijani truck drivers in Germany.

Other honours went to Atena Eshtiaghi, whose score for Jens Schanze’s Materia Prima won the German Documentary Film Music Award, and Laura Kansy’s Hello New Body, How Are You Today?, which received the all inclusive Award for inclusive documentary production. The kinokino Audience Award went to Denise Riedmayr’s When Pigs Fly.