The Twenty-Seventh Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival

Reviewed by Jonathan Murray

The Twenty-Seventh Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival took place between March 6 and 16, and opened and closed by emphasizing two main characteristics that shaped the 2025 edition: an interest in new technology on one hand and a commitment to wider topicality of subject matter throughout the 261-film-strong program on the other. Piotr Winiewicz’s opening film, About a Hero, inaugurated 2025’s new technology theme in provocatively playful fashion. Presenting its script as AI-generated from the oeuvre of Werner Herzog, Winiewicz puts to the test the latter’s belief that “A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years” by dispatching a deepfake, digital Herzog to investigate the suspicious death of a factory worker in a fictitious small European town. Meanwhile, Shoshannah Stern’s closing film, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, offered a far more classical proposition in formal and narrative terms. Stern’s biographical portrait of pioneering d/Deaf American actor Marlee Matlin foregrounds the numerous practical obstacles and societal prejudices that diversely abled artists such as Matlin have challenged, but continue to be challenged by, within mainstream film industries.

Death and the author: About a Hero

Standing up through Stand-Up: Coexistence, My Ass!

The twin themes of technology and topicality were visible elsewhere within the 2025 Festival’s International Competition section. Amber Fares’s Coexistence, My Ass!, which won the main Golden Alexander award, illuminates the deep ethnic and ideological divisions that define contemporary Israeli culture and society by tracking the burgeoning career of politically outspoken comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi. While the inclusion of large segments of the latter’s Standup show about the struggle for viable forms of Israeli/Palestinian coexistence grants Fares’s film a distinctively humorous edge, the movie also draws a serious-minded structural contrast between the burgeoning professional success and deepening personal insecurity that Shuster-Eliassi’s politics simultaneously create for her within a place as polarized as present-day Israel.

Deep-rooted forms of ethnic inequality and injustice were also explored in another International Competition award-winner, Jesse Short Bull and David France’s Free Leonard Peltier, which won both the Silver Alexander and the FIPRESCI Jury award. Like Coexistence, My Ass! and several other 2025 International Competition films, Free Leonard Peltier deploys the biopic form to inspirational, yet ideologically informed effect. Indeed, Short Bull and France’s work directly contributes to the decades-long process of political activism that it simultaneously documents. Systematically unpicking the inconsistencies within the notorious mid-1970s conviction for murder of pioneering Native American activist Leonard Peltier, the film also recounts the half-century-long campaign for Peltier’s pardoning. Free Leonard Peltier ends by documenting both its subject’s eventual release in 2024 and the film’s own contribution to that unexpected outcome.

Lights, camera, activism: Free Leonard Peltier

Looking to the future: Gen_

Elsewhere in the International Competition, Gianluca Matarrese’s Gen_ won the Festival’s Mermaid Award for best LGBTQI+-themed film in the entire 2025 edition. Matarrese’s film reflected the prominence of character portrait-based work within its specific section and the wider 2025 edition’s overarching exploration of the complex and unfolding impacts of new technologies. Documenting the final months in the working life of Italian consultant physician Maurizio Bini at a public fertility clinic in Milan, Gen_ follows its central subject’s admirable example in exemplifying the importance of calm, open-minded humaneness within ongoing debates around different forms of clinically enabled gender transition and affirmation. Based largely within Bini’s consultation room and giving voice to a diverse range of patients with varying needs and wishes, Gen_ offers an intrinsically optimistic vision of our ability to harness emergent scientific knowledge to progressive societal effect.

A (fake) essay film: The Shadow Scholars

As in past years, the 2025 edition helped attendees navigate its extensive program by subdividing it into a range of carefully curated sections: fifteen in all and a mix of established and new. Beyond the International Competition, Cineaste concentrated on the festival’s largest section, Open Horizons, which looks to provide a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary documentary film on a global scale. Eloise King’s The Shadow Scholars explored this year’s defining thematic focus on new technologies within a narrative that spans three separate continents. Black British academic Patricia Kingori uncovers the extent to which the now-global, AI-facilitated trade in fake essay-writing reflects and entrenches centuries-old processes of colonial extraction and exploitation. American and British students benefit from degree qualifications they don’t in fact earn, while their highly educated African counterparts are trapped in an underground economy that precludes them from receiving due academic recognition or career progression.

Death of a post-Cold War dream: Connected

Continuing a chastening trend visible within numerous recent editions of Thessaloniki, and reflecting the festival’s status as one of the most prominent in Eastern and South-eastern Europe, 2025’s Open Horizons showcased numerous films that respond to the ongoing war in Ukraine. The most tonally multifaceted of these was Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp, which lays bare the moral paradoxes of life during wartime by contrasting the age-dependent educational experiences of different generations of Ukrainian school pupils. While elementary-level children are comforted via peace-themed games and creative activities, high school seniors are trained for imminent active military service. Gornostai presents the nation’s wholesale pivot to a war footing as an example of remarkable collective resilience, but her film also underscores the extent to which the price of conflict is paid by all age groups, and within all areas, of Ukrainian society. Elsewhere, Vera Krichevskaya’s Connected explores the post-Cold War period that presaged the Ukraine war by charting the decades-long, unlikely friendship between an American policeman and the late Dmitry Zimin, a prominent Russian scientist-turned-dissident philanthropist. As Zimin nears death, he and Krichevskaya’s film reflect on the inexorable evaporation of the briefly heady geopolitical optimism of the late 1980s and 1990s.

The classroom as war room: Timestamp

Nuclear anxieties: Special Operation

Transcending the sound of gunfire: Viktor

Other Ukraine-themed Open Horizons films adopted more formally experimental, but no politically disquieting approaches to the ongoing war. Olivier Sarbil’s Viktor immerses itself in the subjective soundscape of its titular protagonist, a d/Deaf young Kharkiv native refused permission to serve in the Ukrainian military. The film’s sonic design, alternating long interludes of silence with bursts of muffled clangor, evokes peoples’ inability to comprehensively grasp the far-reaching nature of the geopolitical events that envelop their quotidian lives. Perhaps most audaciously of all, Oleksiy Radynski’s Special Operation uses internal CCTV footage to document the Russian military’s brief occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant during the first weeks of the war in early 2022. The affectless, digitally degraded nature of the film’s images, and the aimless and repetitive actions of the occupying forces they capture on screen, evoke the sense of a conflict precipitated for no substantive reason, yet all the more intractable because of that fact.

Troubled memories: The Flats

Physician, reveal thyself: The Secret of Me

Cineaste also sampled notable work across several other 2025 program sections. From the festival’s Top Docs section, which brings together prominent festival films of the past year, Alessandra Celesia’s The Flats deploys a distinctive, reenactment-based creative documentary mode in order to depict the open-ended political and psychological aftermath of an ostensibly resolved military and civil conflict, the Northern Irish Troubles. Following the lives of several inhabitants of Belfast’s New Lodge public housing scheme, Celesia collaborates with her subjects to re-enact their traumatic life events during the Troubles’ late-Seventies/early-Eighties peak. Contesting the prevalent stereotype of Northern Ireland as a society obsessed by ritual revisitation of sectarian conflict and grievance, The Flats depicts Northern Irish citizens’ determination to move forward within their individual and collective lives. From the Film Forward section, our 2025 highlight was Brittany Shyne’s exceptional debut feature Seeds, an aesthetically composed but politically angry account of the historical decimation of an entire African American rural small landowning class and the determination of the remaining inheritors of that tradition to maintain their familial and cultural connection to the land they cultivate. Finally, from the Newcomers Competition, we were impressed and moved by Grace Hughes-Hallett’s The Secret of Me, which provides central protagonist Jim Ambrose, an American intersex person, with a space from which to recount the story of their appalling mistreatment by medical practitioners from the very moment of birth and the extent to which their story is symptomatic of far wider clinical and societal prejudice that afflicts intersex people.

This land is your land: Seeds

Hearing d/Deaf experience: Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore

On balance, formally and narratively orthodox, but person-centered, filmmaking of this kind engaged our attention more consistently than the more experimental provocations of a work like festival opener About a Hero. Yet the fundamental strength of a festival as extensive as Thessaloniki is that its 2025 edition could accommodate Piotr Winiewicz’s conceptual radicalism at one chronological and curatorial pole and the formal classicism of closing film Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore at the other without feeling self-conflicted or -contradicting at either juncture or any point in between them. This year’s festival succeeded once again in demonstrating the diversity of contemporary documentary practice and debates without being derailed or diverted down blind alleys by those very same things.

For further information on the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, visit here.

Jonathan Murray teaches film and visual culture at the University of Edinburgh.

Copyright © 2025 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 4