The 23rd Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival has announced the six films of its Hungarian Competition. The festival takes place from 16 to 25 November in Budapest and eight other Hungarian cities, with its full programme of more than 80 films due in mid-October. Several of the competing directors are making their feature-length documentary debuts after earlier careers in journalism and photography.
Festival Director Enikő Gyureskó observes that the films begin with the filmmakers’ own families and communities, or with protagonists followed for years, and reach well beyond the individual. They also ask «what individuals can do with circumstances they did not choose».
Attila Ponczók’s debut Papa, which also opens the festival, starts from the search for a new home for the director’s hot-tempered grandfather. Shot over four years, it expands into a portrait of Hungary’s elderly-care system and won Best Documentary at the 2026 Hungarian Film Awards. In Meant to Be, Olivér Márk Tóth follows rapper Marcell Szirmai, known as Pogány Induló, for three years as he leaves a provincial high school behind and becomes one of his generation’s biggest music stars. Developed through dok.incubator from a four-part HBO series, the feature took the Golden Hejnał Award for Best Music Documentary at the Krakow Film Festival.
Kitti Fődi, a journalist at 444, spent nine months with fourteen teenagers in an unusual secondary-school programme for Bakpakk, which receives its Hungarian premiere at Verzió. Sára Timár’s Under the Dance Floor is set in the Budapest villa where she grew up with her father, the Kossuth Prize-winning choreographer Sándor Timár, who died earlier this year. During the communist dictatorship its basement served for the secret detention of defendants in show trials. The Hungarian-French co-production won the Unifrance Doc Award at the DOK Leipzig Co-Pro Market.
Ákos K. Kovács’s Theatre from Mud reunites György Hernyák and Frigyes Kovács, founders of the Tanyaszínház travelling theatre in Vojvodina, for rehearsals marking the company’s 45th anniversary. It received the Documentary Film Award at the 2026 Bangkok Movie Awards. In Ha költő akarsz lenni, photographer Máté Bartha, a winner of the Robert Capa Grand Prize, follows Attila Bertók as he works to keep alive the legacy of his father, the poet László Bertók, who died in 2020, and searches for a voice of his own.
Hungarian directors are also well represented in the short film competition, which includes Dorottya Márton’s Letter to the Editors. Drawing on letters once sent by readers to the women’s magazine Nők Lapja, it sets women’s experiences under socialism in dialogue with the present. Ora Dekornfeld’s The Grandfather Puzzle assembles the past of a hundred-year-old Holocaust survivor one fragment at a time.
This year’s festival motto, ‘Seeing Is Believing?’, responds to the spread of deepfakes, artificial intelligence and manipulated content. More information is available on the Verzió website.
