A collection of innovative nonfiction filmmaking
Spectrum is the festival’s most expansive space for boundary-breaking nonfiction — where form ruptures and futures flicker. These films rewire documentary grammar through mythic conjurings, archival remixes, and radical aesthetics.
From media uprisings and protest movements to quiet reckonings with grief, memory, and belonging, this program spans the globe — from the Black diaspora in the Global North to intimate, place-rooted visions from Sri Lanka, Kenya, China, and South Korea. Together, these works speak in cinematic frequencies tuned to risk, reinvention, and revelation.
Presented by
The Great North
Jenn Nkiru’s The Great North transforms Manchester into a portal of memory, labour, and resistance, where red brick echoes with diasporic histories. A radical, rhythmic debut rooted in Afro-surrealism and ancestral recall.
Khartoum
Displaced by war, five exiles of Sudan’s capital give voice to their experiences through reenactment, animation, and recollection. Khartoum is a lyrical, collaborative documentary about survival, exile, and the enduring pulse of a fractured city.
Ancestral Visions of the Future
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese returns with Ancestral Visions of the Future, a poetic reflection on memory, myth, and exile. Guided by a dream-speaking mother and a life-extending puppeteer, the film traces Mosese's personal journey.
Agatha's Almanac
Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.
Edhi Alice: Take
Kim Ilrhan's doc explores the lives of two trans women. Alice is a lighting director who dreams of becoming a dancer; Edhi is a counsellor preparing for gender reassignment surgery. The film is notable for its honesty and its wealth of detail.
Memory of Princess Mumbi
Can a filmmaker depict the future without AI? Damien Hauser crafts a genre-blending Afro-speculative fable about love, war, and the future of storytelling in a resurrected African kingdom. A micro-budget epic fueled by digital invention and heart.
Fiume o Morte!
The Croatian city of Rijeka rediscovers its own past in this delightfully unconventional hybrid documentary about Italian poet and proto-fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio, who seized the city known in Italian as Fiume in 1919.
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible
Rajee Samarasinghe’s poetic debut, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, blends allegory and testimony from Tamil women in war-torn Sri Lanka. Filmed secretly under military rule, it’s a haunting meditation on grief, survival, and the refusal to forget.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
Kahlil Joseph’s long-awaited, hypnotic debut is a 21-track odyssey through Black memory and imagination. Fiction, archive, and digital fragments collide aboard a transatlantic ship in this radical, time-bending voyage across collective consciousness.