Tampere Film Festival has announced its 2026 competition selections and released the full programme for the event’s 56th edition, running March 4–8 in Tampere. Across the National Competition, International Competition and the genre-focused Generation XYZ Competition, the festival received a record 8,127 submissions and selected 121 films from 49 countries. All competition titles will screen during the festival and will also be available online via the Filmchief platform.
Documentary is particularly prominent in the National Competition. Six of those are documentaries over 30 minutes, alongside 35 short films under 30 minutes. Among the longform highlights is John Webster’s Lessons in Fire (Palava maa, Finland, 2025), a recent Jussi Award nominee for Best Cinematography (credited to Jarkko T. Laine); Webster previously won the festival’s Risto Jarva Award in 1999. The festival also spotlights filmmaker Jukka Kärkkäinen, who enters with documentary premieres in both length categories: The Beauty of Errors (Finland, 2026) and The Beauty of Automobiles (Finland, 2026). Kärkkäinen previously won the main prize in the National Competition’s over-30-minute category in 2018 (shared with J-P Passi).
In the under-30-minute documentary selection, Tampere points to Selma Vilhunen’s A Gate to Paradise (Portti Paratiisiin, Finland, 2025) and Risto-Pekka Blom’s experimental documentary Too Blue Sky (Liian sininen taivas, Finland, 2026).
Internationally, the festival selected 60 films from 44 countries for its International Competition, with awarded films eligible for Oscar and BAFTA consideration. Selection committee member. The line-up includes previous Tampere prizewinners Randa Maroufi (L’mina) and Lasse Linder (Air Horse One). Finnish-linked documentary entries include Kärkkäinen’s The Beauty of Automobiles and In My Hand (Norway, Sweden, Finland, 2025), co-directed by Marja Helander and Liselotte Wajstedt.
Beyond the competitions, the newly published programme adds further documentary screenings, including a world premiere of Vastavirta Documentary (Finland, 2026), which explores the history of a landmark punk club in Tampere. The festival will also mark International Women’s Day (8 March) with The Day Iceland Stood Still (Iceland, 2024) alongside the Finnish documentary Force of Habit (Finland, 2019) in collaboration with Yle Teema. Additional nonfiction strands include Finnish Film Archive screenings; the programme 100 Years of Radio in Finland celebrates the centenary of Finnish broadcaster Yle with documentaries about Finnish radio, and the festival will also present Witness: Arctic Indigenous Voices III, a documentary programme by filmmakers from Indigenous peoples of the Arctic region.
Find more information on the complete 2026 Tampere Fiolm Festival programme – HERE
