With less than two weeks to go before its 26th edition opens in Wiesbaden on 21 April, goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film has revealed further details of its programme.

Among the newly announced Competition titles, Outliving Shakespeare stands out as one of the programme’s most intriguing documentary propositions. Another key documentary title is Markéta Ekrt Válková’s Amira’s Children, a Czech work that follows a Syrian family over the course of a decade after they are evacuated to Czechia so Amira’s youngest son can receive treatment for a serious heart condition.

Hybrid documentary also plays a major role in the Competition slate. In The Beauty of the Donkey, Dea Gjinovci returns with her father to his native village in Kosovo after more than half a century in Switzerland, using conversations with local residents and an improvised reconstruction of the family home to search for traces of identity, memory and loss. Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebre’s The Kartli Kingdom likewise links intimate lives to unresolved historical violence, focusing on a former sanatorium that has housed displaced persons from Abkhazia since 1993.

That same documentary impulse extends beyond Competition. The newly titled goShorts strand, part of the festival’s 2026 focus on «Revolution,» includes works on protest, political imprisonment, repression and queer Romani self-representation. The programme Romani Cinema: Against the Odds foregrounds eight short films addressing school segregation, deportation, state violence, foster care and intergenerational trauma, while also insisting on joy, resilience and self-assertion.

Find more information on the complete goEast 2026 programme – HERE