Pordenone Docs Fest – Day 2
This year, the Images of Courage award at the Pordenone Docs Fest goes to Uyghur activist Kalbinur Sidik and the Dutch director who gave voice to her story in the film Eyes of the Machine. The award, dedicated to those who use cinema as a tool for testimony and the defense of human rights, will be presented on Thursday, March 26 at 6:00 PM at Cinemazero, following the national premiere of the documentary. Kalbinur Sidik, a survivor of re-education camps in Xinjiang, is now a refugee in the Netherlands. She and the director will be present to receive the award in collaboration with the National Order of Journalists and the Il Capitello Association.
After a sold-out opening day, which even required additional screenings to meet demand, one of the most anticipated events of the festival’s second day takes place at 9:00 PM: a special event combining cinema, history, and live music. A Nord! Nobile, successi e cadute presents rare footage from the LUCE-Cinecittà Archives, dedicated to the polar expeditions of Umberto Nobile in the 1920s, particularly the historic 1926 mission with Roald Amundsen (the first to fly over the Pole by airship), accompanied live by vibraphone music from Luigi Vitale. This is followed by the national premiere of Ice Grave by Robin Hunzinger, a compelling archaeological thriller reconstructing the mysterious 1897 expedition of three explorers traveling by airship to the North Pole. Decades after their disappearance, the ice returns their bodies and photographic film, revealing moments from the final days of that legendary mission. Blending history, science, and memory, the film reflects on the fragile balance of the Arctic in an era marked by climate change, as well as on renewed expansionist ambitions toward those lands.
National premieres begin in the morning at 10:30 AM with The Longer You Bleed by British director Ewan Waddell, in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières. The screening is also dedicated to students. In an age dominated by scrolling, war risks becoming fast-consumption content. Some young Ukrainian refugees in Berlin watch their homeland burn through Instagram: trauma is transformed in the digital era, and people risk becoming dangerously desensitized to pain. Surreal humor remains the only possible shield against a reality that risks normalizing horror. The director and the film’s protagonist and producer Liubov Dyvak will attend the screening.
At 4:30 PM, the national premiere of Cinema Kawakeb by Jordanian director Mahmoud Al Massad offers a poetic and captivating portrait of the oldest movie theater in Amman, which survives—along with the stories of those who inhabit it—amid debt, abandonment, and political tensions, as protests over the war in Gaza intensify.
The Pordenone Docs Fest also hosts several industry events for professionals. At 10:30 AM in the Mediateca, new ways of exploring reality will be discussed, focusing on documentary and immersive experiences in the age of Extended Reality. At 2:30 PM, also in the Mediateca, the session “Formare lo sguardo – educare al documentario tra scuola e politiche culturali” will take place, an international discussion on strategies for bringing documentary cinema into educational pathways. Organized in collaboration with the Italian Association of Videotheques and Mediatheques within the National Cinema and Images for Schools Plan, the panel brings together Italian and European experiences that have integrated documentary into school curricula through festivals, archives, and educational platforms, reflecting on how to build visual literacy capable of shaping informed citizens.
The rich program also includes, at 6:00 PM in Sala Modotti, a screening of Homo Sapiens as part of a tribute to Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, president of the jury for the 19th edition of the festival. The film depicts a world in which humanity has disappeared and nature slowly reclaims abandoned urban and industrial spaces, transforming the ruins of civilization into a silent and unsettling landscape.
At 2:45 PM, the Italian Doc Future! section begins, showcasing emerging talents of Italian cinema with Il Castello Indistruttibile by Danny Biancardi, Stefano La Rosa, and Virginia Nardelli. In the Palermo neighborhood of Danisinni, three young girls transform an abandoned kindergarten into a secret refuge where they imagine a different future: their “Castle,” a space of freedom and complicity.
The festival’s two retrospectives also continue. For “Sarajevo, the Siege: 1992–1996,” curated by Alessandro Del Re, Senior Programming Manager for MUBI, the 2:30 PM screening features Serbian Epics by Paweł Pawlikowski, made in 1992, offering an unsettling look behind the lines of Serbian nationalists led by Radovan Karadžić. This is followed by Les Vivants et les Morts de Sarajevo by Radovan Tadic, filmed between 1992 and 1993, presenting the perspective of the city’s besieged inhabitants.
At 5:00 PM, the second event of the retrospective on the Spanish Civil War, curated by Federico Rossin, features a special guest, leading Spanish film historian Esteve Riambau, and the screening of Le due memorie by Jorge Semprún, made in 1972. Through interviews filmed between France and Spain, often semi-clandestinely, the writer and intellectual explores the difficult relationship between political amnesty and collective amnesia, questioning the role of memory in the construction of democracy.
From 7:30 PM, AperiDocs! returns at spazioZero, accompanied by electronic music from Gullidanda and Al Sagor, blending industrial influences, psychedelia, and techno rhythms.
Finally, throughout the festival, visitors can immerse themselves in DocsXR, the section of the Pordenone Docs Fest dedicated to new narrative technologies. Eight works presented as national premieres invite audiences to “experience” other lives and worlds. These immersive experiences are available free of charge at two locations: the glass pavilion in Piazza XX Settembre and the Mediateca on Via Mazzini 3.