Festival Films 2026: Coming Soon to Theaters and Streaming

A stunning and revealing documentary about the inhumane conditions in state prisons in the United States. Prisoners risk everything to expose a cover-up in one of the most dangerous prison systems in the country: that of Alabama. A shocking story of brutality, corruption, and a system in collapse.

Alles moet beter (Do Better) portrays what it is like to grow up in a world shaped by systemic crises. The film follows several young people who are each affected by this failure in different ways, and traces their search for how things can—or must—be done better.

When director Emma Lesuis receives a suitcase containing family archives from her father-in-law, including the archives of his grandfather Maarten de Niet, she stumbles upon a fraught colonial history that touches her personally. What does it mean to investigate your in-laws' colonial past as a filmmaker with Surinamese roots?

Portrait of Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi. Once a figurehead for peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis, her stance shifted as the Israeli authorities grew increasingly radical. Both very funny and very urgent insight into the mindset of an activist comedian whom some now regard as an enemy of the state.

As the first woman ever elected to the council of her small Iranian village, Sara Shahverdi aims to break long-held patriarchal traditions. She trains teenage girls to ride motorcycles, encourages them to pursue an education and tries to stop child marriages. But Sara’s resilience and combative style bring her many enemies – mostly men.

In the idyllic English countryside lives an intensive dairy farmer called Derek. One day his neighbour, also called Derek, forsakes farming tradition and starts turning his land over to wild nature. How does the community react when one of its own turns his back on their way of life?

Sharp satire by Iranian director Ali Asgari about the slow grind of censorship and the absurdity of repression. Bahram is a 40-year-old filmmaker whose films have all been banned by the Ministry of Culture. When his latest work is once again denied permission, he’s pushed to the edge of defiance.

Egyptian political thriller about a famous actor who is forced to make a propaganda film for the autocratic regime. George Fahmy is a big film star, commissioned to play Egyptian President El-Sisi. He reluctantly accepts – and then begins an affair with the wife of the general overseeing the film.

A poetic documentary about Brazilian Indigenous artist and human rights activist Daiara Tukano, a member of the Tukano people from the Amazon. As she creates a monumental mural at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, a layered story unfolds – one that connects the colonial history of the Netherlands with the living wisdom of the Amazon.

Documentary about sexual violence and forced marriage, focusing on women who were coerced, abducted or imprisoned by their own families. Central figure is Dutch-Pakistani human rights activist Shirin Musa (Femmes for Freedom), tirelessly fighting for their rights.

The once-exiled brewer John Christian Kavakure returns to conflict-scarred Burundi to fulfil his old dream: a brewery that frees Burundians from dependence on multinational Heineken. With locally brewed banana beer, made according to his grandmother’s special recipe.

What is it like to grow up in an asylum seekers' center? Heroes of the Galaxy follows the lives of five children temporarily living on a ship serving as an asylum seekers' center in the port of Amsterdam. As they are forced to deal with an uncertain future and the challenges of integration in a new country in the surreal environment of a former cruise ship, friendship and imagination offer them strength and stability.

The chaos at Kabul airport in 2021 is still vivid in many people’s memories and forms the starting point of the four-part docudrama series Holland Gate.

A group of men in their nineties gather weekly for an Indonesian lunch. They look back on their Indonesian childhood, something they’ve never spoken about. Several of them were imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in Indonesia during World War II, and they share their memories and their parents’ diary entries.

An unprecedented insight into the Gaza war. Seen through the eyes of the local team of Agence France-Presse (AFP), it is a story of factual journalism under attack by propaganda and disinformation from all sides, threatening the very essence of war reporting.

The extraordinary story of a woman who risks everything to expose one of the world’s most brutal regimes. When a Syrian academic in Amsterdam receives shocking footage of a massacre carried out by an unknown army officer, she tracks down the perpetrators by unconventional means.

In this cinematic love portrait composed of home videos, photographs, diary entries, audio recordings and interviews, director Ollie Launspach explores the impact of his transition on his girlfriend Sterre. As he attempts to make sense of her emotional world, the chaos within his own mind becomes increasingly apparent.

Observational documentary following newcomers in the Netherlands as they navigate their path through the integration process. The challenges of civic integration become tangible, and the audience is confronted with a mirror: a system that is efficient and client-focused in design, yet increasingly disconnected from human reality.

In the town of Mariinka in Eastern Ukraine, the film traces several young Ukrainians whose lives have been forever shaped by over ten years of war and conflict in the Donbas. A story about belonging, national loyalty and the fault lines where political conflicts trump even the bonds of blood.

When Bart, the 28-year-old brother of filmmaker Koert Davidse, died in 1986, no one spoke about the mysterious illness causing his death: AIDS. In their Zeeland family, where a culture of silence prevailed, Bart’s coming out was also never spoken about. Gripping documentary, weaving a deeply personal story with broader themes.

One in ten people hear voices. In this film by Maasja Ooms, we meet five people who live with this phenomenon. One person has a single voice, another has nineteen. One voice wants to protect, another wants to kill.

As Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, primary schools across Russia’s hinterlands are transformed into recruitment sites for the war. Facing the ethical dilemma of working in a system defined by propaganda and violence, a brave teacher goes undercover to film what’s really happening in his school.

Afghan artist-filmmaker Dawood Hilmandi returns home from Amsterdam after suffering a great loss to restore his relationship with his aging, authoritarian father. But has the gap between father and son grown too wide to bridge?

Fatima, 17, the youngest of three daughters, treads carefully as she searches for her own path, grappling with emerging desires, her attraction to women, and her loyalty to her caring French-Algerian family.

At an all-boys water polo camp, socially anxious 12-year-old Ben is pulled into a cruel tradition targeting an outcast with an illness they call ‘The Plague’. But as the lines between game and reality blur, Ben fears the joke might be hiding something real.

In poverty-stricken 1990s Iraq, young Lamia is selected to prepare a cake for the President’s birthday. Because basic ingredients are hard to find, Lamia goes on a journey in search of eggs, flour and sugar. It becomes a tender, tragicomic odyssey, offering a child-eye’s view of life under authoritarianism.

In 1971, young Newsweek reporter Alec Shimkin discovered a secret US military campaign that committed war crimes on an enormous scale in the Mekong Delta. It was code-named Operation Speedy Express. Following the 1968 My Lai massacre on Vietnamese civilians, Alec believed this “Super My Lai” also had to be exposed.

Jérôme Clément-Wilz was sexually abused as a child by a priest. In this deeply personal film, he tries to search for clues in his memories and come to terms with the complicity of his former social environment.

When porn has become the norm, intimacy is the new taboo. Introverted teenager Alec only experiences intimacy through the lens working for his father’s pornography business. When a classmate challenges him to embrace real connection, he’s forced to step out from behind the camera.

Elderly brothers Rob and René – father and uncle of filmmaker Tom Fassaert – cannot live with, but also not without each other. René lives like a recluse in a cluttered, congested house, his brother Rob intervenes. But then Tom begins to suspect that something else lies beneath the dynamic between the brothers.

Soviet Union, 1937. Thousands of letters from detainees falsely accused by the regime are burned in a prison cell. Against all odds, one reaches its destination: the newly appointed local prosecutor Alexander Kornev. What follows is a haunting historical drama about the workings of evil bureaucracy in Stalin’s Russia.