goEast has set the frame for its 26th edition, positioning the Wiesbaden-based festival as both a showcase for new Central and Eastern European cinema and a forum for interrogating today’s image politics. Running 21–27 April 2026, the DFF-backed event will again split its focus between curated industry-facing discourse and a competition lineup built around contemporary regional storytelling, with the full program due in March.
The festival’s annual symposium will carry the title «Cinematic Strategies of Resistance», expanding its remit beyond a purely East European focus to track historical and contemporary East–West conflicts «from a global perspective.» The program description foregrounds how authoritarian power and AI-driven moving images are reshaping perception and political debate, arguing for cinema as a space for collective knowledge production and critical engagement. Screening selections and discussions are designed to place archival and historical works in dialogue with contemporary case studies, including material on Belarus, the former GDR, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as shorts from Congo, Indonesia, and Chile.
Curated by film and media scholar Borjana Gaković, the symposium roster includes contributors across scholarship, curation, and filmmaking, among them Tara Najd Ahmadi, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Ivan Velisavljević, Zsuzsa Zádori, and Vika Leshchenko. The Murnau-Filmtheater will serve as the symposium cinema, with lectures hosted at Heimathafen in Wiesbaden’s Altes Gericht.
On the competition side, goEast has announced a first wave of five 2025 titles, all set for German premieres. Roman Ostrovskyi’s Ukrainian documentary Clouds Move With Great Speed follows lives shaped by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Lithuanian director Šarūnas Bartas brings the hybrid feature Laguna, a grief journey set on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Photographer Ivan Boiko’s Georgia/UK production The Wind Blows Wherever It Wants tracks shepherds and migrating flocks over 16 months, shot on a Bolex and largely dialogue-free. Latvia’s Laila Pakalniņa is represented by the essay film Cat on My Mind, built from recovered photographic negatives (1968–1978) and structured as a reflection on perception and projection. Completing the initial batch is Ivana Mladenović’s Romanian-Serbian-Italian-Greek co-production Sorella di Clausura, an absurdist comedy previously nominated for Locarno’s Golden Leopard and awarded Sarajevo’s directing prize.
For industry and press, accreditation is now open, with access spanning screenings in Wiesbaden, Mainz, Darmstadt, and Frankfurt, plus panels and an online media library during the festival. The official press conference is scheduled for 14 April at 11:00 at the renovated Caligari FilmBühne, while advance ticket sales open online on 2 April.
