site.btaSofia DocuMental Announces New Human Rights and Bulgarian Documentary Film Competitions

Sofia DocuMental announced two new competitions to the media on Wednesday, one for Best International Human Rights Film and another for Best Bulgarian Documentary Film. The documentary film festival takes place from September 24 to October 4 under the motto Keep Your Eyes Peeled.

"Art is a very effective way of reaching the maximum number of people, especially when it comes to more difficult and complex topics such as human rights or their violations," Simonetta Bozhinova, from Amnesty International Bulgaria, said. The organization supports the competition for Best International Human Rights Film. "At Amnesty, we always say that rights are not something abstract. They are the foundation on which we build the life we want to live," Bozhinova added.

The jury for the Best International Human Rights Film competition is international. It includes North Macedonian documentary filmmaker, curator and researcher Kumjana Novakova; Romanian journalist and documentary filmmaker Lina Vdovii; and Bulgarian journalist and documentary filmmaker Venelin Petkov. Novakova and Vdovii have participated in Sofia DocuMental with their own films. Vdovii received last year’s Sofia DocuMental award for Best Female Director for her film Tata.

Amnesty International and Sofia DocuMental also announced another joint initiative, a tour featuring the best films from this year’s festival as well as previous editions, Bozhinova said. Admission will be free, and the tour will visit Plovdiv, Pernik, Veliko Tarnovo, Burgas and Varna in September and October 2026.

For the first time in Bulgaria, an award for Best Bulgarian Documentary Film will be presented, Sofia DocuMental Festival Director Martichka Bozhilova said. "It was high time this happened in Bulgaria. This competitive element will certainly give greater confidence to our national documentary cinema, which has traditionally been pushed into a corner," she added.

Rayna Teneva’s film Geography Is Destiny, which represented Bulgaria at the 61st Venice Biennale, will have its Bulgarian premiere as part of the Best Bulgarian Documentary Film competition. The Bulgarian selection also includes four other premiere screenings, among them Elena Stoycheva’s Elena in Deleyna and Svetoslav Draganov’s Dear Maria. The organizers plan the continuation of the competition in future editions of the festival.

The jury in this category is also international. It includes Serbia’s Marko Grba Singh, Artistic Director of Belgrade Documentary Film Festival (Beldocs), as well as Vanya Dimitrova, content manager at Neterra TV+, and Tatjana Bozic, a Croatian-Dutch filmmaker and director of the festival’s closing film, Fragments of Belonging (2026). The Balkan Documentary Center will provide a cash prize. The Bulgarian daily Dnevnik partners the initiative.

Two special premieres will be presented as part of the festival’s seventh edition, the organizers announced.

A screening of director Milcho Manchevski’s Good People (2026), which tells the story of the tragedy in Kocani, will take place on September 26 at the Cinema House. This year, at the invitation of the Single Step Foundation, Bulgarian audiences will also have the opportunity to meet filmmaker Pavel Talankin, Sofia DocuMental’s Nadezhda Moskovska said. The Bulgarian premiere of the Oscar-winning film Mr. Nobody Against Putin (2025) took place at last year’s festival. This year’s screening will be held at the Cinema House on September 25.

"At Sofia DocuMental, we love predicting the Oscar nominees and winners for Best Documentary Feature. We’re pretty good at it," Bozhilova said.

The programme also includes Another Story, an initiative dedicated to rediscovering the contribution of women directors to European cinema. The project looks back through film history to uncover the "rather well-buried treasures" in the work of women filmmakers, Moskovska said. Among the filmmakers whose work the initiative highlights are Binka Zhelyazkova and Czech director Vera Chytilova, one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

The annual competition for best film by a female director, supported by the Bulgarian Fund for Women, continues. Stories of ordinary people, who often challenge the status quo on their own, are among those on which the festival focuses its attention, Alex Stankova from the Fund said. Documentary cinema gives visibility both to these people and to the filmmakers who tell their stories, she added.

For the fifth consecutive year, Sofia DocuMental also includes the Balkan Documentary Market, featuring nearly 70 foreign guests and the presentation of new documentary projects. The forum has already earned recognition not only at regional but also at European level, Bozhilova said. The main programme is hosted by the Goethe-Institut.