The full programme for Doclisboa 2026 has now been unveiled. Running from 15 to 25 October, the festival returns to its usual venues — Culturgest, Cinema São Jorge, Cinemateca Portuguesa and Cinema Ideal — with a performance also taking place this year at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre. In total, the 24th edition presents 198 films from 51 countries, including 34 world premieres, 13 international premieres, three European premieres and 32 Portuguese films, spanning generations, geographies and different ways of making and thinking about cinema.
Opening and closing this edition are two filmmakers who turn their own relationship with cinema into the very material of their films. Doclisboa opens with Asphalt Guerrilla, by Edgar Pêra, which takes Manuel Ricardo Sousa’s book of the same name as its starting point, bringing together the accounts of a former FP-25 operative with the filmmaker’s own memories of the turbulent 1980s, through archive material, fiction and artificial intelligence. Closing the festival, Alain Cavalier, at the age of 95, presents Thanks for Coming, a new and final chapter in his cinematic diary, in which everyday gestures and encounters become the stuff of cinema.
This year’s International Competition comprises 11 films, including seven world premieres, three international premieres and one European premiere. The Portuguese Competition also features 11 films (see list below), all of them world premieres. The International Competition includes films by filmmakers already familiar to festival audiences, amongst them João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, alongside others whose work is being presented in Portugal for the first time, in a selection marked by remarkable sophistication, aesthetic diversity and political acuity. The Portuguese Competition features new works by Inês Oliveira, Ico Costa, Pedro Neves and Manuel Mozos, alongside filmmakers presenting their films at Doclisboa for the first time.
NEW VISIONS
New Visions once again explores the possibilities of cinema as an art form intimately connected to the experience of the present, bringing together films that move across different times, memories and histories through open and experimental forms. This edition’s guest filmmakers are France’s Sophie Roger, whose work is marked by formal freedom and radicalism, with titles including Desert Island (2014) and The Bitches (2026); and Filipino filmmaker John Torres, represented by three key films from a body of work shaped by hybrid and poetic experimentation: The Remotes (2026), Lukas the Strange (2013) and Todo todo teros (2006).
The section also features films by authors including Lee Anne Schmitt, Ben Russell, Declan Clarke, Lucía Seles, Ted Fendt and Lynne Sachs, among many others. Mariano Llinás dedicates Life of Jorge Luis Borges to the life and literary universe of the Argentine writer, drawing on his papers, books and places to search for the figure of a man for whom literature constituted a world of its own. María Aparicio brings Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion, winner of the GdA Director’s Award in Venice, in which Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía becomes the gateway to a reflection on the history of labour struggles. Denis Côté returns with Nobody’s Violence, a surprising fiction centred on a fascinating protagonist who takes us on a journey through death, love and encounters with others. Robert and June (and all the time in the world), by Jem Cohen, follows artists June Leaf and Robert Frank over the years, between Cape Breton and an ever-changing New York. In Wild Asparagus, a Portuguese-French co-production, Avi Mograbi follows his Arabic teacher, Ali Al Azhari, as he searches for the ruins of Saffuriya, the village from which he was expelled during the 1948 Nakba.
Archive takes centre stage in this edition of New Visions. In An Incomplete Calendar, Sanaz Sohrabi takes a record released in Venezuela in the 1980s as the starting point for recovering images and sounds of the Palestinian liberation struggle and Pan-Arab solidarity of the 1960s and 1970s. The Clearing, by Sabine Groenewegen, returns to Dutch colonial exploitation in Sumatra and the silenced violence of the rubber plantations through found and contemporary images. The festival also pays tribute to Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, archaeologists of images who turned the archive into a site of confrontation between History and what images may still reveal, presenting Oh! uomo, one of the duo’s major works, in which they developed their practice of the analytical camera and which concludes their trilogy devoted to the First World War.
FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON
In From the Earth to the Moon, cinema, history and politics converge in films that question images and what they reveal about past and present. The section, several titles from which have already been announced in recent weeks, presents the focus Miguel Antunes Ramos: Creatures and Myths of the New Fascisms, featuring Dragons, in which the filmmaker delves into the images that constructed the political myth of Jair Bolsonaro, and The Voice of God, which follows two young evangelical preachers at different points in their lives, in a Brazil where religion, politics and social media intersect. In Habibi Hussein, Alex Bakri takes the restoration of Cinema Jenin and its former projectionist’s attempt to reclaim his place as the starting point for an exploration of the complexities of international aid in Palestine and a disappearing film culture. Last Movies, by Stanley Schtinter, proposes an alternative history of cinema’s first century: what were the last films watched by figures such as John F. Kennedy, Bette Davis, Charlie Chaplin or Kurt Cobain before they died?
Political memory and the images of History run through other parts of the section. In Atlas of Disappearance (2026), Manuel Correa follows three relatives of people who disappeared during the Spanish Civil War as they search for their bodies in the Valley of the Fallen, using new digital technologies to locate them. The Land That Wouldn’t Die (2025), by Andreas Goldstein, returns to the final years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the expectations of the generation that founded it. Jia Zhangke, meanwhile, returns with Du Ling zhi ying (Torino Shadow) (2026), following a woman who travels from southern China to Turin to meet her husband, only for his unexpected departure to lead her towards a renewed encounter with herself — and with cinema.
Palestine is also at the heart of the programme Aude Fourel and Monica Maurer: Bringing Back the Images of Palestine. Monica Maurer has devoted much of her life to documenting the Palestinian struggle, making films that have become irreplaceable documents and recovering works by other filmmakers. Aude Fourel, in turn, filmed Maurer working with her archives in Where Life Holds (2026). The programme places this new film in dialogue with images of Palestine from the 1970s and 1980s, including Land Day (1981), Born Out of Death (1981), The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (1979) and Tall el Zaatar (1977), made and preserved against disappearance. Monica Maurer and Aude Fourel will be in Lisbon to present and share these images with festival audiences.
The section also revisits the work of Collectif Mohamed, a militant filmmaking collective that emerged in France in the late 1970s, through Zone immigrée (1980) and Ils ont tué Kader (1980), two films connected to the experiences and struggles of immigrant communities in France.
A final addition to the From the Earth to the Moon programme follows the recent passing of Patricio Guzmán: the Chilean filmmaker’s final film, My Imaginary Country, previously unreleased in Portugal, will be presented in a one-off screening.
HEART BEAT
In Heart Beat, music, artistic creation and memory move across different times and geographies. Alongside the titles already announced, Kurtág Fragments, by Dénes Nagy, portrays composer György Kurtág’s intimate relationship with music and his musical exploration as he celebrates his centenary this year; The Voice of Orpheus, by Arnold Pasquier, returns to Orphée et Eurydice, a landmark work by Pina Bausch, following its revival almost three decades later; and Five Eyes, by Karim Debbagh, returns to Tangier and footage shot by the filmmaker 25 years earlier to reconstruct the memory of Paul Bowles and the Moroccan circle around him, revealing the writer and Jane Bowles from a perspective far removed from familiar Orientalist clichés.
As part of Mostra Espanha, the section also hosts a focus dedicated to Jonás Trueba, featuring his latest film, Vistillas (2026), and The Wishful Thinkers 13 + 13 (2013–2026), placing them in dialogue with Chicho o mientras el cuerpo aguante (una comedia didáctica) (1982), by his father, Fernando Trueba.
GREEN YEARS, NEBULAE AND ABCDOC
The competitive Green Years section, dedicated to discovering emerging talent and first experiences in filmmaking, once again occupies a special place in the Doclisboa programme. This year, the competition brings together 11 films, seven of them world premieres, making space for new voices, languages and ways of thinking about cinema.
Nebulae, the festival’s industry platform, welcomes Greece as its guest country, while the abcDoc educational project continues to champion the power of documentary as a pedagogical tool and a means of engaging with the world.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
The Measured Everlasting Is 1.334 Billion Years / Kamphaeng Chakkrawan — Thunska
Pansittivorakul — Tailândia, Hong Kong, China — 2026 — 98 min (Estreia Mundial)
About Space and Depth — Paula Gaitán — Brasil — 2026 — 138 min (Estreia Mundial)
Saturn or a Brief Treatise on Melancholy / Saturno o pequeño tratado de la melancolía — Mariano Donoso Makowski — Argentina — 2026 — 112 min (Estreia Mundial)
Geography Is Destiny / Географията е съдба — Rayna Teneva — Alemanha, Bulgária, Áustria — 2026 — 69 min (Estreia Internacional)
Memoirs of a Badger / Mémoires d’un blaireau — Isabelle Prim — França — 2026 — 94 min (Estreia Internacional)
Memórias de Uma Viagem pelo Alto Rio Negro — Kasia Mich, Dani Correia — Brasil — 2026 — 71 min (Estreia Mundial)
For the Moon / Car la Lune — Éric Baudelaire — França — 2026 — 88 min (Estreia Europeia)
Smarty / Umnitsa — Nikita Lavretski, Sergey Kolosovski — Lituânia — 2026 — 88 min (Estreia Mundial)
The Centaur / Le Centaure — Jacques Meilleurat — França — 2026 — 65 min (Estreia Internacional)
Don’t Touch Me / Noli Me Tangere — Ghassan Salhab — Líbano — 2026 — 72 min (Estreia Mundial)
13 Alfinetes / 13 Pins — João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata — Portugal — 2026 — 61 min (Estreia Mundial)
PORTUGUESE COMPETITION
Povo e Poder / People and Power — Ico Costa — Portugal, França, Moçambique — 2026 — 190 min (Estreia Mundial)
Os Continuadores da Revolução — Pedro Neves — Portugal, Moçambique, França — 2026 — 91 min (Estreia Mundial)
The Morning Wind / Vent du matin — Cláudia Ribeiro — Portugal — 2026 — 82 min (Estreia Mundial)
Visitas de Uma Parente Afastada / Visits from a Distant Relative — Inês Oliveira — Portugal — 2026 — 62 min (Estreia Mundial)
A Voz de Todos / Everyone’s Voice – Jornal do Fundão — Manuel Mozos — Portugal — 2026 — 81 min (Estreia Mundial)
Hipogeus / Hypogea — Raul Domingues — Portugal — 2026 — 39 min (Estreia Mundial)
A casa é a ruína de uma casa / The house is the ruin of a house — Inês Sapeta Dias — Portugal — 2026 — 31 min (Estreia Mundial)
Sopa de Cavalo Cansado / Tired Horse Soup — Maria Novo — Portugal — 2026 — 16 min (Estreia Mundial)
Golden Hour / Goruden Awa — André Santos Martins — Japão, Alemanha, Portugal — 2026 — 66 min (Estreia Mundial)
The Continuation / La continuación — Maxime Martinot — França, Portugal — 2026 — 30 min (Estreia Mundial)
Mysticisme du Sud — Fábio Penela — Portugal — 2026 — 34 min (Estreia Mundial)
GREEN YEARS
Ponto de Fuga / Vanishing Point — Rita Torres — Portugal — 2026 — 5 min (Estreia Mundial)
I Fear My Father More than N*tanyahu — Kay Ayach — Portugal, Hungria, Bélgica, Líbano — 2025 — 18 min (Estreia Mundial)
A Pulga — Francisco João, Vasco Morais — Portugal — 2026 — 27 min (Estreia Mundial)
a sea, a sea, a sea, a sea / more, more, more, more — Dasha Likhaia — Áustria, Rússia — 2026 — 48 min (Estreia Internacional)
Outras Manhãs Distantes / Other Distant Mornings — João Coroa Justino — Portugal — 2026 — 25 min (Estreia Mundial)
Frozen Lands / Les Terres gelées — Thomas Schira, Takeiki Flon — Bélgica — 2026 — 29 min (Estreia Internacional)
Yilma — Elena Berelowitsch — Cuba, Itália — 2026 — 10 min (Estreia Mundial)
Square of the Unseen / Platia Aoraton — Theodore Selekos — Grécia — 2026 — 30 min (Estreia Internacional)
A Fossa / The Trench — Manuel Ferreira — Portugal — 2025 — 39 min (Estreia Mundial)
Calandra — Chloe Cazorla, Lucas Lagrange, Laura Raniela, Jaime Aurata — Espanha — 2026 — 24 min (Estreia Mundial)
Catacombs / Saradeeb — Shehab Fatoum — Alemanha — 2026 — 29 min (Estreia Internacional)
