Every May, Millennium Docs Against Gravity reminds Warsaw why documentary cinema matters. Now in its 23rd year — and freshly Oscar-qualifying for its Grand Prix — the festival has assembled one of its most geographically and emotionally ambitious lineups to date. Films arrive from Ukraine, Iran, Chile, Iceland, and right here in Poland, each asking uncomfortable questions in formally inventive ways.

If you caught the opening weekend, you already know the buzz is real. If you didn’t, there’s still time — the festival runs in Warsaw cinemas until 19 May, with the full programme available online at mdag.pl from 19 May through 1 June.
We’ve picked five films that together cover the full range of what MDAG does best: intimate portraiture, civic witness, formal experimentation, and the kind of filmmaking that stays with you long after the lights come up. Consider this your essential guide.

1. Closure

(dir. Michał Marczak, Poland)

The festival’s opening film is an immediate frontrunner for the Grand Prix, and it earns that position. The film follows Daniel, a father whose teenage son was last seen on a Warsaw bridge before vanishing — either into the Vistula or simply into the city — leaving the family suspended in a limbo between grief and hope. Marczak, a Warsaw native, shoots the river with an almost painterly stillness, letting long silences do the heavy lifting. The camera doesn’t chase — it accompanies. What distinguishes Closure is how it transforms a true-crime premise into something profoundly philosophical: a man interrogating his entire life from a small boat. It won the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki and premiered at Sundance, and it’s not hard to see why — this is the kind of documentary that changes you. Reportedly, a viewer left Marczak a voicemail saying the film pulled them back from suicidal thoughts. When cinema does that, it transcends the festival circuit entirely.

2. A Fox Under a Pink Moon

(dirs. Mehrdad Oskouei & Soraya Akhalaghi, Iran/Austria)

This is the most formally adventurous film in competition and perhaps the most vital. Sixteen-year-old Soraya Akhalaghi filmed key moments of her own life on a mobile phone over five years while attempting to escape Iran, fleeing a violent husband to join her mother in Austria. Co-directed with Iranian master Oskouei, the film abandons traditional documentary structure in favour of a form built on images, gestures, and symbols — closer to visual poetry than reportage. The fact that Soraya is simultaneously protagonist, cinematographer, and co-director collapses the usual power dynamic between filmmaker and subject in stunning fashion. It won the Award for Best Film in the International Competition at IDFA, the world’s biggest documentary festival. For Warsaw audiences especially, a film about a young woman navigating bureaucratic borders in Europe will feel urgently close to home.

3. Traces

(dirs. Alisa Kovalenko & Marysia Nikituk, Ukraine/Poland)

The most important film at this edition of MDAG, full stop. This Ukrainian-Polish co-production tells the story of Ukrainian women who, after experiencing sexual violence and torture during the Russian invasion, begin to speak out about their ordeal. It had its world premiere at the Berlinale, where it won the Documentary Panorama Audience Award. What makes Traces exceptional — and not merely harrowing — is its directorial restraint. Kovalenko and Nikituk never sensationalise; they build an architecture of testimony that honours its subjects rather than exploits them. Screening this in Warsaw, where the proximity to the war is felt daily, gives the film an additional layer of civic weight. If documentary cinema exists to make the unseen undeniable, Traces does this with fierce dignity.

4. A Child of My Own

(dir. Maite Alberdi, Chile)

The formal wildcard of the competition and all the better for it. Two-time Oscar nominee Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent) examines a young married woman who faced such intense social pressure to have a baby that she faked her own pregnancy. Alberdi blurs the line between documentary and fiction in ways that feel genuinely disorienting — in the best possible sense. Her direction here is coolly surgical: she lets the social machinery of expectation speak for itself without ever editorialising. The result is a film that is simultaneously intimate and damning, a forensic look at how profoundly patriarchal norms can warp an individual life. The Chilean director has quietly become one of the most formally inventive documentary filmmakers working anywhere, and this film should cement that reputation internationally.

5. Time and Water

(dir. Sara Dosa, USA/Iceland)

The film that will haunt you longest after the credits roll. Oscar nominee Sara Dosa (Fire of Love) turns her lens to Iceland’s disappearing glaciers, framed through the work and voice of author Andri Snær Magnason, whose writing on climate grief has moved readers worldwide. Dosa has a rare gift for finding the lyrical inside the catastrophic — she did it with volcanoes and she does it here with ice. The cinematography is extraordinary, vast expanses of blue-white slowly shrinking, shot with a tenderness that feels almost like mourning in real time. But this isn’t a film of despair — it’s one of reckoning, asking what it means to witness something irreplaceable dying and still choose to go on. In a festival themed around “searching,” this may be the most searching film of them all.