This is a story about Katya, a young woman who works as a welder. Abandoned as a little girl, she embarks on a personal journey to reunite with her lost family – to weld it back together, just like she welds metal at work. Despite pain and disappointment, Katya tries to protect her beloved little sister from a tragic fate, hoping for a better future for the both of them.

A subtly textured self-portrait of Soraya, a free-spirited 16-year-old Afghan artist in Iran who has been trying for five years to make her way to Europe. She chillingly captures everything on her phone, while pouring her fears, worries and joy into extraordinary works of art, inhabited by recurring figures – a loyal fox, a watchful pink moon, and an ever-laughing clown.

* Contains images depicting domestic violence.

In 1991, on the outskirts of Tenja, Josip Reihl Kir – chief of the Osijek Police Department, a negotiator and opponent of war – was assassinated. This is a story about the last months of his life at the dawn of the bloodthirsty Croatian-Serbian war, told through witness statements and archive materials. Still today, many elements of the assassination remain unclear, and those who ordered it are still unknown.

* Recommended for ages 15 and over.

During the Second Intifada in occupied Palestine, fear, siege, and death define the reality of the city of Hebron. Moments from the past are revived through childhood memory, intersecting with the collective memory. Amid the continuity and repetition of it all, what do we remember? What do we forget?

* Recommended for ages 15 and over.

Assembled from archival footage from the 2024 Palestine protests in Berlin, this film-essay is centered on the police camera, recording and archiving protestors’ bodies, and the protestors’ body; on the state’s monopoly on violence and protesting under constant surveillance. A composition of public space in which the historical origins of the police, its militarization, and its racial targeting emerge.

While making a documentary on the Palestine-Israel conflict, an Iranian filmmaker is abruptly drawn into war at home. Forced to flee Tehran with his family, he finds temporary refuge in a suburban home. Over twelve tense days, the film transforms from an analytical essay into a self-reflective diary where archive, memory, and lived experience collapse into one another.

* Recommended for ages 12 and over; depicts graphic scenes of war.

Jazz and decolonization collide in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s murder. In 1961, six months after sixteen newly independent African countries joined the UN, the majority vote shifted from colonial powers. Amid Khrushchev’s shoe-banging indignation over the UN’s role in Lumumba’s overthrow, the US sent jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to divert attention from the CIA-backed coup.

* Film recommended for ages 12 and over.

Siblings Victor (he/they) and Alexandra (she/they) return to Romania for a wedding. Victor documents their family’s history of rug weaving and discovers that even tapestry can become a debate about gender, tradition, and resistance. The two share the same values, but they have different approaches. Only confronted by the hostility of other villagers they come to question the importance of queer unity.

Benoît built his paradise hidden from view, emancipated in his own way, resolved to face the constraints of a space which, in imaginations, conflicts with his identity. The countryside. One day, he and other queers from the area decide to organize the first Pride of the Périgord to reclaim space, celebrate, heal, and pave the way for change.

“Our School” follows Alin, Beni and Dana, three Roma children in a Transylvanian village who are among the first participants in an initiative to integrate the ethnically segregated Romanian schools. Shot over four years, the documentary touches on institutionalized racism, public education, and the intractability of poverty, in this bittersweet and often funny story about tradition and progress, hope and race.

In October 2009, Javier Chocobar, a member of the indigenous Chuschagasta community in Tucumán, Argentina, was shot and killed defending his people from forced eviction, with two others wounded. In her enlightening documentary, Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel pays cinematic tribute to those deliberately erased from history, interweaving the murder trial, the lives of Chocobar and the Chuschagasta people, and Latin America’s colonialist legacy of land and property theft – with a visually ravishing, vertiginous approach.

* Recommended for ages 12 and over.

Panel Housing / Domy z panelů, dir. Jiří Menzel
Czechoslovakia, 1959, 7’

I For One Am Alive and Well... / Aflați despre mine..., dir. Adrian Sârbu
Romania, 1982, 17’

The Hub / Čvor, dir. Krsto Papić
Yugoslavia, 1969, 12’

Archaic Torso / Archaikus torzó, dir. Péter Dobai
Hungary, 1971, 32’

Our long-standing SAHIA VINTAGE program, curated around the archives of the Alexandru Sahia Studio and established over a decade ago, is evolving into SAHIA VINTAGE Connect. This extension of the original project proposes a pan-regional approach to the documentary output of the former Eastern Bloc, exploring the transnational imagination that emerges at the intersection of diverse archives and documentary traditions. We believe that the curation of audiovisual archives has the potential to enrich historical knowledge and inspire meaningful memory work at both an individual and societal level.

We began this journey with the Shadows of History program, screened throughout 2025–2026 in unconventional spaces across Romania and KineDok partner countries (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia). We continue with this program which looks at the relationship between homes and bodies in four different forms: from the home as a more or less secure physical and psychological space, to the body-as-home and zone of contention, raising questions about power and resistance within stifling political circumstances.

The program opens with an early cinematic tribute by then-student Jiří Menzel to the new model of dwelling introduced in socialist Czechoslovakia: the prefabricated panel building. Two decades later, we follow the private lives of the youthful dwellers of one such panel block – a single workers' hostel on the outskirts of Bucharest. Elsewhere, the modern architecture of a railway hub, serving as a temporary refuge for Yugoslavia’s unemployed, raises questions about what is acceptable, or advisable, to include in a documentary film. Finally, the body as an ethical and aesthetic ideal for a bodybuilder attempting to escape the conditioning of his time encapsulates his yearning for freedom and self-determination, but also the loneliness flickering on the fringes of Hungary’s “Goulash Communism”.

The post-screening conversation will address the legacy of regional documentary and its place in today's archives and will explore other key themes opened by the films, such as state socialism and housing, and the body and home as sites of identity. 

SAHIA VINTAGE Connect is curated by Adina Brădeanu.

Consider cutting open a tomato, consider the worlds within. Consider a pickled tomato recipe in a world full of LED-light-grown tomatoes. Consider following tomatoes from closed Dutch greenhouses to Moldova, home to the filmmaker and many workers who leave their own patches to work behind glass walls. Consider your guide a manuscript of family recipes and countless ways to ferment tomatoes.

Emerging Voices, the OWR program supporting new voices in documentary film, showcases five filmmakers and their films in its second edition. The films will be followed by an extended dialogue with the directors.

Daria Ciocan ("April") (b. 2005, Iași, Romania) is a Film and Television Directing student at the National University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” in Bucharest. Her projects generally explore themes such as adolescence, generational trauma, and the intimate and fragile bonds between women, with a focus on solidarity and the search for identity. She is also passionate about the aesthetics of slow cinema and documentary. So far, she has directed three short films during her studies – “Our Time”, “Ania” and “April”. Her latest fiction short film, “Ania”, was selected as part of the 2025 CineMAiubit Film Festival, Future Perspectives section.

Flavia Matei ("Here, there was a park") is an animation director and VFX Artist (compositing) from Bucharest. She has a passion for magical realism, mixed media and recently is into mixed media.

Stela Pascal ("Stela") is a transgender woman from Chișinău, Moldova. She is a filmmaker with a background of five feature films made fully on her own (one person crew). She is considered by others a fighter for trans rights and human rights. She has been fighting for human rights way longer than the others know. All started in 2008 and since then it has been a long journey. But she does not want to do that. All she ever wanted was to be herself and to make art. Particularly films. But life sometimes has its own plans and terms for us.

Ioana Țurcan ("my meat cuts your meat and there's no time to eat (work in progress)") experiments with various artistic and community-based processes, organizing exhibitions and local initiatives on themes related to the environment, uncertain loss, grief, anger, and care. When she’s not making films, she tends to an orchard.

Leo Zbancă is a Moldovan film director, screenwriter, and producer with over 18 years of experience in the film industry, working across fiction film, documentary, and promotional content. They have worked in audiovisual production in multiple countries across Europe and Africa. Alongside filmmaking, they have more than 10 years of experience as a trainer and facilitator, leading workshops and learning programs in storytelling, media literacy, advocacy, campaigning, and audiovisual tools for NGOs. In 2025, Leo produced the documentary series “Oameni printre Oameni” for Moldovan TV channel TV8. They currently work in the NGO sector at GENDERDOC-M, Moldova’s largest LGBTQ+ organization, where they focus on fundraising, international representation, and strategic communication. They also lead an initiative group  whose main focus is combating propaganda and disinformation through entertainment content.