Documentary Picks from TSFF 2025

Each January, Trieste Film Festival offers a carefully curated glimpse into current fiction and documentary filmmaking from Central and Eastern Europe. This program, prepared in collaboration with the TSFF, presents a selection of the festival’s standout new documentaries from this constantly shifting region.

From the philosophical minimalism of Laila Pakalniņa’s Termini to the volcanic memories of Lapilli by Paula Ďurinová, these films reflect on time, place, and identity in flux. Alice On & Off dives into the split realities of online performance and private truth, while Tomasz Wolski's A Year in the Life of a Country observes Poland’s fractured present with biting precision and wit.

We move across generations and geographies: from Lana Gogoberidze’s reflective Mother and Daughter — a rare intergenerational Georgian dialogue — to Ivars Seleckis’s dual offerings, capturing both teenage growing pains (To Be Continued. Teenhood) and the Latvian countryside’s stubborn transformation (The Land). Finally, Travis Wilkerson’s Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing connects personal grief and political history in a stark, meditative register.