The 22nd Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival has announced its complete 2025 lineup, presenting 49 new creative documentaries across 11 sections under the slogan «We Exist Together.»
Screenings will take place November 11–19 in Budapest and eight other Hungarian cities, with an online program from November 20–30. Ticket sales open in late October.
Verzió’s International Competition features nine titles that the festival describes as formally ambitious and artistically strong. Highlights include Cutting Through Rocks, Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, which follows an Iranian female councillor challenging patriarchy, and Khartoum, a double award winner at the Berlinale that interweaves the lives of five Sudanese protagonists with animated sequences during civil war. Other selections span social precarity and family structures: 9-Month Contract examines surrogacy and poverty in Georgia; Flophouse America explores addiction and the possibility of renewal; The Family Approach looks inside German child protection systems; and Holding Liat follows an American–Israeli family seeking the return of a relative kidnapped on October 7. Two Ukraine-focused works—Cuba & Alaska, centred on frontline medics, and Immortals—and With Hasan in Gaza round out the field.
The Doc Future Competition gathers debut and second features that sketch contemporary social and personal borderlands, with stories about identity, care, and belonging told with an emphasis on honesty and empathy.
Four films compete in the Hungarian section, spotlighting family history, memory, and resilience. Don’t worry Sari! blends archives and present-day footage; My Father’s Daughter investigates responsibility and disappearance; Come on Tete! follows a Paralympic champion and mother; and My Chemical Information System profiles the life and research of Hungarian-born scientist Gyula Dékány while posing philosophical questions about humanity’s place in the world.
Responding to the ongoing war in Ukraine, «Ukrainian Panorama» assembles frontline and personal perspectives, including the latest film by Oscar-winning Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, which depicts soldiers advancing through devastated terrain to liberate a village. The film screens in Hungary for the first time at Verzió.
Two new geographic spotlights expand the program. A first-ever Korean focus includes the international premieres of shorts Coral Love, about reef protection on Jeju Island, and Still Waiting at Paengmok, on the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster, alongside the feature K-Family Affairs, which examines intergenerational dynamics between the democratization-era «386 generation» and today’s youth. An Iraq strand presents films from Sinjar, Baghdad, and Mosul that document efforts to rebuild a decade after Saddam Hussein’s fall and five years after ISIS.
Archival and essayistic practices are foregrounded in the Viewfinder section, with Luuk Bouwman’s The Propagandist investigating the Dutch Nazi Party’s film chief Jan Teunissen, and Long Road to the Director’s Chair revisiting a 1973 women’s film seminar. Another selection, «Lives in Creation,» probes artistic life and self-interrogation through works such as Days of Wonder and Love-22-Love.
