Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2026 comes to Sydney from 5–15 February 2026 for its 14th edition, presenting a bold international program that celebrates creative resistance, traces fragmented histories, and finds unexpected joy amid hardship. This year’s line-up traverses continents and languages, travelling to Lebanon, Palestine, France, Greece, Vietnam, Cameroon, and beyond, and explores themes of memory and archival preservation, postcolonial identity, feminist solidarity, migration, cultural survival, and the ethics of care.
Filmmakers reconstruct decades of audio-visual history in countries without national archives, uncover personal connections hidden within sci-fi classics, and follow children who transform abandoned buildings into dream castles through the power of imagination. The program captures performers bringing laughter to hospital wards, matriarchs passing endangered languages to new generations, and women pledging solidarity across continents in a buoyant feminist musical.
From films shot on vintage Bolex cameras and MiniDV, in Sicilian ruins and Vietnamese caves, at militarised borders and quiet family gatherings, and featuring introductions by acclaimed filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2026 promises a global portrait of documentary cinema at its most inventive, humane, and vital: confronting difficult truths while honouring the creativity and resilience of those who refuse to be erased.
FILMS IN FRENCH AT ANTENNA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL 2026
Director: Dominique Cabrera
Country: France
Language: French
Few films have been held historically dearer than Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée, a minimalist masterpiece often grouped among the greatest and most influential of all. In her deeply personal and inventive new film La Jetée, The Fifth Shot, acclaimed director Dominique Cabrera uncovers a startling connection: Marker’s sci-fi photomontage may also be an inadvertent historical document of her own family. La Jetée was made the same year Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule, when hundreds of thousands of French people with roots in Algeria — including Cabrera’s family — fled to Paris via Orly Airport. Six decades later, Cabrera’s cousin becomes convinced that he appears in the film’s fifth image, standing with his parents as they welcome relatives at the airport. What follows is a thrilling and tender detective story intertwining personal history, postcolonial memory, and the history of cinema itself. Winner of Best Film at DOK Leipzig Film Festival.
Director : Agnès Varda
Country : France, Belgium
Language: French
In the early 1960s in Paris, two young women become friends. Pomme is an aspiring singer. Suzanne is a pregnant country girl unable to support a third child. Pomme lends Suzanne the money for an illegal abortion, but a sudden tragedy soon separates them. Ten years later, they reunite at a demonstration and pledge to keep in touch via postcard, as each of their lives is irrevocably changed by the women’s liberation movement. A buoyant hymn to sisterly solidarity rooted in the hard-won victories of a generation of women, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is one of Agnès Varda’s warmest and most politically trenchant films, a feminist musical for the ages.
The screening will be introduced by festival guest Kirsten Johnson
FILMS WHERE FRENCH IS JUST ONE OF THE LANGUAGES AT ANTENNA 2026
Director: Lana Daher
Countries: France, Lebanon, Germany, Qatar
Languages: Arabic, French, and English,
Do You Love Me is a playful and deeply personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. A love letter to Beirut, it spans seventy years of film, television, home videos, and photography to explore the Lebanese collective psyche — marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers, and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as an act of resistance, renewal, and remembrance.
Director: Julien Elie
Country: Canada
Language: English, French, Spanish
In the quiet border village of Boca Chica, Texas — hemmed in by the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande — life once moved to the rhythm of waves and wildlife. But the landscape is shifting. Beaches have closed, homes bought out, and wetlands drained to make way for SpaceX’s colossal 50-story rockets. Hovering above the village like steel deities, these rockets mark not just the privatization of space, but the violent remapping of Earth itself, fuelled by the ambitions of a tech mogul with a messianic vision for humanity’s future. Following scientists, spectators, and residents on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, director Julien Élie captures a surreal moment in which space conquest is marketed as environmental salvation. Filmed in stark black and white and shaped by postwar sci-fi aesthetics, Shifting Baselines is a haunting observational essay on how speculative futures displace real communities, rewrite land, and recast technology as divine intervention — reminding us that cosmic ambition often begins with earthly erasure.
Director: Olia Verriopoulou
Countries: Greece, France
Languages: Greek, French
During a stay in her native Greece, Olia learns that a childhood friend has cancer — a diagnosis her doctors and family have chosen to hide from her. Expected to maintain the secret herself, Olia begins to question a practice she recognises from her own upbringing: the long-standing tradition of offering “medical lies” in the name of care. Stories of a Lie begins with a simple question — why do we hide the truth from the people we love? — and unfolds into a tender, searching portrait of a daughter and her mercurial, charismatic dentist father. Moving between present-day conversations, childhood home-movie footage, and the playful dynamic she shares with her father, Verriopoulou traces how secrecy around illness shapes families, relationships, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep going. Gentle, curious, and quietly disarming, Stories of a Lie explores the fragile ways we navigate illness, love, and the truths we choose to share — or to withhold — and ultimately lets the question ‘Is it right to lie?’ unfold into a deeper one: how we care for one another at the edge of the unknowable.
The Travellers (Les Voyageurs)
Director : David Bingong
Countries : Cameroon, Spain
Languages : Spanish, French, Bassari
Along the heavily militarized border between Morocco and the Spanish city of Ceuta on the North African coast, young Sub-Saharan men sing of the futures they seek and the losses they carry. They are travellers, not by choice but by necessity. One of them is Cameroonian David Bingong, whose camcorder becomes a tool of persistence in their shared dreams, despite impossible barriers and escalating hostility to their bodies and movements. In defiance of these brutalities, Bingong created a rare first-hand portrait of migrants’ journeys — full of gestures of camaraderie, tenderness, and humour, and fuelled by the shared belief of a better life. Winner of Grierson Award (Best Documentary) at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) 2025.
FRENCH CO-PRODUCTIONS THAT ARE NOT IN FRENCH AT ANTENNA
Directors: Nicolas Graux, Trương Minh Quý
Countries: Belgium, France, Vietnam
Languages: Ruc, Vietnamese
Winner of the ‘Filmmakers of the Present’ award at Locarno, Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý’s second collaboration is a delicate portrait of cultural loss and resilience, seen through the eyes of one of Vietnam’s smallest ethnic groups. Loosely structured around a vocabulary lesson in Rục, Hair, Paper, Water… follows no-nonsense matriarch Cao Thị Hậu — one of the last remaining members of the Rục people — as she tends to her grandchildren. Tracking her from her village to Saigon and back to the caves where she was born, the film quietly catalogs her language and medicinal practices as she passes them down to a generation growing up under the pressures of modernization and education. Shot on a vintage Bolex, Graux and Trương’s agile camera drifts through rich textures and sounds, forming a gentle elegy for a world Cao strives to keep alive.
Director: Vladlena Sandu
Countries: France, Netherlands
Language: Russian
After her parents’ separation, six-year-old Vladlena Sandu moves from Crimea to Grozny. There, in 1994, she becomes caught up in the Russian Federation’s war of occupation against the Chechen people. Her family’s life fractures — friends flee, neighbours vanish, and the city around her turns to ruin. Decades later, Sandu revisits those years in Memory, transforming personal trauma into lyrical, haunting cinema. Combining archival images, miniature tableaux, and surreal re-enactments, she rebuilds her past through a child’s eyes — where King Kong becomes a guardian, and play a form of survival. Echoing Tarkovsky, Pasolini, and Parajanov yet unmistakably her own, Sandu’s film is a thought-provoking, existential exploration of the experience of war — confronting us with a haunting question: how can the cycle of violence that shapes children and is passed through generations be broken? Hypnotic, challenging, and never anything less than unforgettable, Memory is a staggering achievement — one of the most original and daring films of the year.
Sambizanga
Director : Sarah Maldoror
Countries: Angola, France
Languages: Portuguese, Lingala, Kimbundu
This revolutionary bombshell by Sarah Maldoror chronicles the awakening of Angola’s independence movement. Based on a true story, Sambizanga follows a young woman as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city’s centre looking for her husband after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that will ultimately help to ignite a national uprising. Featuring a cast of non-professionals—many of whom were themselves involved in anticolonial resistance—this landmark work of political cinema honours the essential roles of women, as well as the hardships they endure, in the global struggle for liberation.
The screening will be introduced by festival guest kirsten johnson
Directors: D. Biancardi, V. Nardelli & S. La Rosa
Countries : France & Italy
Language : Italian
Out on the street, chaos reigns. But in an abandoned building in the middle of Sicily, Angelo, Mery and Rosy have found a sanctuary where they can let their imaginations run wild without the interference of adults. The building may be falling apart, but you get the impression that the rest of the adult world is not doing too well either. And amidst the rubble, the three children have created a universe of their own, a dream castle in the middle of a chaotic reality. The Castle is a film with a formidable ability to immerse itself in the parallel fantasy world of children – and to do so on their own terms. If you’ve ever been a child yourself, you recognize the magical feeling that together you can enchant the world just by the power of thought. But nothing lasts forever, and when the municipality announces its plans to renovate the place, the castle is suddenly at risk.
Director : Abdulrahman Sabbah
Countries : Palestine, France, Qatar
Language : Arabic
A portrait of the greatly beloved performer Alaa Meqdad, whose life has been upended by the bombings of Gaza City, forcing him and his family into a tent camp. With extraordinary optimism, he embraces life in the here and now, and tries to bring some joy to those around him. Together with his partner, he performs as Aloosh the Clown for children in hospitals and on the streets. Their jokes, songs, and boundless energy make the horrific reality momentarily disappear. Caught between hope for a ceasefire and despair amid the relentless horror of the war, they endure the loss of their loved ones and their homes. A return to their home—or what remains of it—comes into view when news arrives during filming that the roads to Gaza City have been reopened. Surprisingly uplifting, The Clown of Gaza is a moving celebration of humanity and love in pitch-dark times.
Director: Kamal Aljafari
Countries : Palestine, Germany, France, Qatar
Language: Arabic
It is 2001 in Gaza, and Palestinian filmmaker and visual artist Kamal Aljafari travels from north to south, accompanied by a MiniDV camera, searching for a man he met while briefly imprisoned as a teenager. The footage, now nearly a quarter-century old and unseen by the filmmaker until recently, unfolds with a tranquil, unhurried rhythm. From beaches, cars, homes, cafés, and market stalls, Aljafari’s youthful camera captures quiet moments of daily, dignified life — the smiling faces of children, each as beautiful to behold as they are agonizing. Haunting and mournful, yet bursting with vitality, this is an essential work by a major filmmaker. With Hasan in Gaza is an aching witness to the struggle of the Palestinian people and the beauty of a land now barely recognisable — capturing lives and streets that may now exist only in memory.
KEY INFO FOR ANTENNA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL 2026
WHAT: Antenna Documentary Film Festival 2026
WHEN: 5 – 15 February 2026
WHERE: Various locations in Sydney
HOW: Purchase your tickets online via the links above or purchase a pass to see multiple films via here https://antennafestival.org/buy-tickets/
HOW MUCH:
Individual ticket prices are as follows:
- Adult $26
- Senior $22
- Full Time Student $22
There are also multi-passes if you want to see a few films – or if there is a group of you going, you can book up to four tickets per session at the best value price.
- 5 Film Pass – $110 (Save $20),
- 10 Film Pass – $195 (Save $65),
- 20 Film Pass – $350 (Save $170)
Which films do you want to see at Antenna Documentary Fim Festival 2026?
