“What we call ‘social media’ is full of hurrying by. Documentaries are a radical alternative to this: they make us stay for a bit – the best ones, at least.”

-Nick Fraser¹

Although often overshadowed by its glitzier South Korean festival older brother in Busan, the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival has continued to be one of the best and most eclectic celebrations of non-fiction in Asia.¹ Going through the festival program each year, there is a sense that the programmers are attempting to represent the current state of the documentary, and this year is no exception. In addition to the Korean and International Competitions, DMZ has a “Frontier Competition” (added in 2023) that “aims to broaden our understanding of documentary, to test the boundaries of tradition and convention, and to offer perspectives that illuminate the connection between film and the world.”² This idea of wanting to test documentary’s boundaries is at the forefront of the festival, with sections on such categories as “Docufiction” and “Essay” as a challenge to the more traditional “Verité” section. But even here, the festival is aware of the difficulty of this category: “The Verite section honors documentary cinema’s enduring commitment to truth (verité), while grappling with an urgent question: what does truth mean in the world we live in today?”³ Even the Special Focus programs this year showed non-fiction’s polarity, with a massive retrospective on the cinema of observational master Frederick Wiseman juxtaposed with “Human, AI, Their Film & Their Future.” All of this was unified by its opposition to the unthinking speed of contemporary media and the effort of documentary to, as the opening quote by Nick Fraser argues, slow us down and make us stay (and hopefully think) for a bit.

Figure 1:

Letter to an Unknown Mother

In the Korean Competition section, Korean-Australian filmmaker Cho Jin-seok’s Letter to an Unknown Mother was a standout, a poetic work about Cho’s search for his birth mother. There have been many films about Korean adoptees, in both the realms of fiction and non-fiction, including another at the festival, Jo Se-young’s K-Number (2024), an expository style examination of the corruption of the Korean overseas adoption industry.⁴ Given this, Cho smartly decided to make the film very personal, an experimental combination of a voiceover speaking to the mother he has been unable to find played over long, static takes from places around the world (Portugal, Japan, and Spain) Cho captured while trying to locate her. The structure reminded me of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976), with the child instead of the parent sending the letters, but apparently this was not a main influence. However, there is a strong strain of cinephilia throughout which Cho believes is a substitute for the Korean culture he was denied:

In many ways cinema has helped fill the void in my identity given I didn’t have a birth culture to mirror - throughout the film there are references to filmmakers who have meant a great deal to me over the years (Ophuls, Oshima, Chris Marker, Pedro Costa, Im Kwon-taek) and in many ways filmmakers like them have shaped my identity in ways that a biological Korean culture should have but was not available to me. You can see throughout the film the intrusion of film and filmmakers invading what should be an adoption narrative and I think that probably has everything to do with cinema shaping my life in ways that I never got from any other sources.⁵

By the film’s conclusion, Cho’s own footage has been replaced with Im Kwon-taek’s Gil-so-ddeum (1986), another film about a separated mother and son, and yet it all feels of a singular vision, one both specific and yet relatable: the need for and desire for a culture that reflects your identity.

Also in the Korean Competition was Koh Hee-young’s Sa-jin-ui Eol-gul (A Portrait of Photography), a conventional biographical study of the Japanese photographer Kuwabara Shisei, who first rose to prominence as an artist in the 1960s with his work on the victims of Minamata disease and later covered South Korea quite extensively, at least partly because he married a Korean woman on one of his early trips to the country. Kuwabara is an intriguing figure, and Koh provides candid interviews and interactions with both him and his family. But with that access comes a lack of critical inquiry that makes this verge into hagiography, which was particularly notable when Kuwabara speaks out against the greed that led to sex workers on American army bases in South Korea, with no mention of the Japanese government’s use of “comfort women” just two decades before. Despite being a solid work, it was slightly disappointing, given the quality of some of Koh’s previous work, such as Mul-sum (Breathing Underwater) (2016) and Bul-sum (The Breathing of the Fire) (2019).

Ko Han-bul’s Ga-kkeum-eun Yeo-jeong-I A-reum-dap-gi-do Ha-da (Sometimes, Beauty Lies Along the Journey) is another portrait of a single individual, although not a famous artist; rather, it is a 30-something man named Seon-young, who is trying to pass a civil service exam while keeping his collapsing family together. He is also in a wheelchair after an accident left him paralyzed at the age of eighteen. It is told mostly in an observational style, with limited interaction with the filmmaker and a few expository intertitles, an admirable attempt to present this man and his family’s life, which could be turned into a maudlin melodrama, as ordinarily as possible. This creates a tension, in that the hardships of the character give the documentary its interest and yet the filmmaker tries to undercut this with the quotidian aspects of his existence. While not always compelling, it achieved its desired effect, and its more reserved style is preferable to documentaries attempting to mimic contemporary reality television and social media, such as Hwang Da-eun and Park Hong-yeol’s Ban-chik-wang Mong-ki (The Rule Breaker). It follows a stay-at-home father of four and the ways in which this family breaks the unspoken rules of Korean society (having four children, a single income from the mother, a lack of private education, etc). Unfortunately, its video blog style and multiple graphics (an influence from Korean reality shows) drains most of the tension and interest, especially over the course of its 102 minutes. It does represent a trend in non-fiction media, although one that the festival is largely an alternative against.⁶

Figure 2:

Mr. Nobody Against Putin

Unsurprisingly, within the international entries, contemporary war zones were a major focus, including two films centered on Russia’s continuing attack on the Ukraine. But other than sharing this commonality, the two works could not be much different. David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which was the festival’s Opening Film, is a satirical look at the Russia propaganda machine from the inside, done in the performative mode popularized by Michael Moore. Co-director Talankin was a schoolteacher and media events coordinator for his school in the small city of Karabash, in the Ural Mountains, known primarily, Talankin explains sardonically, for its toxic pollution. When Russia invades the Ukraine, the school is ordered to invest its educational hours in pro-war rallies and the memorizing of scripted government missives. Eventually, Talankin is forced to leave the country but takes his videos with him. Despite the aesthetic limitations of its amateur cinematography and its highly subjective approach, the film is a valuable look at how dis-information transforms a community. The TABOR collective’s Militantropos (which played in the International Competition section) is a more challenging work, a combination of observational footage taken by three Ukrainian directors (Simon Mozgovyi, Yelizaveta Smith and Alina Gorlova) of the country under siege. Through editing and the extensive use of music and sound effects, the filmmakers transform this material into a poetic evocation of what it is like when a whole society is forced into becoming a “militantropos” (a human of war), despite their civilian status. Unlike the jingoistic sloganeering satirized in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Militantropos is free of overt political commentary, content to instead to get the viewer to feel and experience day-to-day life in the Ukraine since the war. As a result, its value as truth is far more convincing.

Figure 3:

With Hasan in Gaza

There were a few films centered on the Middle East, including the winner of the Fronter Competition, Kamal Aljafari’s Maa Hasan fi Ghaza (With Hasan in Gaza), a unique and haunting work of experimental non-fiction consisting mostly of footage Aljafari had taken on MiniDV back in 2001. At the time, Aljafari had been recently released from a long prison sentence and was searching Gaza for a fellow inmate, filming along the way to document his experiences. There is little narrative in the film, but the ghostly feel of the lo-fi images combined with our knowledge of what has been happening in Gaza over the past two years gives the material a disturbing quality, causing us to imagine, often for the worse, what has become of those we encounter, particularly the children. Over the last half of the film, while never becoming direct, Aljafari does include more on-screen text, including references to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and a concluding narrative poem. To quote the director: “It is a film about the catastrophe, and the poetry that resists. This is my first film, which I have never made.”⁷

Figure 4:

The Vanishing Point

Also in the Frontier Competition, and equally worthy of recognition, was Bani Khoshnoudi’s Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point), which tells the personal story of her family’s history with the repressive Iranian regime, including her mother’s cousin, who the government disappeared in 1988. Khoshnoudi’s style, however, avoids the traditional expository approach:

When I am making a documentary, I’m not thinking how to teach or give factual information necessarily, but more an experience, a way of seeing differently and shifting perspective. I work with images and sounds in a way to expand on what we think is our objective way of seeing, underlying what we expect from an image or sound, and what we may actually feel or discover about our own way of seeing.⁸

This is far from the “objective” idea of direct cinema, yet Khoshnoudi includes a great deal of observational footage that she shot over a 15-year period, extended scenes that buffer the more intimate sequences with those close to her (especially memorable is a beautiful scene with her aunt, who describes her past resistance to theocracy and then promises Khoshnoudi a photo album when she passes away; we later see this item arrive to the director’s Parisian home). As the film continues, the observational footage ceases to be her own, as she has not been able to return to Iran since participating in protests in June 2009. This is replaced by videos uploaded to the internet, indicating a continuation of struggle and solidarity while conveying a sense of disconnect and loss.

Figure 5:

Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks also takes place in Iran, but it is strikingly different in both subject matter and approach despite the sense of opposition the two films share. It follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to a village council in the rural north of the country and won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, although it failed to capture the International Grand Prize here.⁹ Khaki and Eyni take a more conventional, character-based, and observational approach to concentrate on Shahverdi, who is certainly a fierce and compelling character, pushing strongly for changes in how women are treated in the village and bravely challenging the patriarchal order. The film’s best moments are when it can express this visually through Shahverdi’s motorcycle riding, a symbol of her freedom and an activity heavily rebuked by the male elders when Shahverdi dares to bring some younger women along with her. The larger political context is not the focus here, keeping its emphasis on the local, but the gender struggles detailed are hardly limited to northern Iran, as co-director Khaki, herself an Iranian-American, noted when she described gender as an “unfinished project” even in the United States.¹⁰ Indeed, the village elders use a familiar strategy of the current authoritarian global right, questioning Shahverdi’s gender identity and her status as a woman to discredit her position as community leader. Taken together, the two are worthy non-fiction companions to the more acclaimed work of Jafar Panahi, whose two most recent films, Khers Nist (No Bears) and Yek Tasadof-e Sadeh (It Was Just an Accident) seem to be in dialogue with Cutting Through Rocks and The Vanishing Point, respectively.

Outside of competition in the Verité section were three films addressing the American political landscape, two directly and the other by association, with the latter the more effective. Errol Morris’s Separated (2024), a collaboration with the journalist Jacob Saboroff detailing the tragedy of the family separation policy, is a needed critique of America’s approach to immigration and deportation, although a much more conventional treatment than one would expect from Morris. Likewise, Michael Premo’s Homegrown (2024) is a straightforward, observational look at a variety of right-wing groups and individuals who would eventually take part in the January 6^th attack on the Capitol. Premo gets a great deal of candid footage of these men, particularly Chris Quaglin, who would receive one of the longest prison sentences given to the rioters, and it is striking how much of their rhetoric has become mainstream Republican talking points (blaming Antifa, Marxist, and liberal cities for society’s ills). Homegrown wants to present these men as rather sad and pathetic and perhaps even victims of manipulative politicians like Donald Trump. The events of 2025 make the film read differently, with knowledge of the resurrection of the ideology the men represent and, of course, that Quaglin and many others like him have been pardoned and are back in society.¹¹

Figure 6:

Predators

David Osit’s Predators, the best of this trio of American films, was not as overtly political as Separated or Homegrown but was more insightful in getting at the psychology that has led to the current moment. It is an exploration of the television news program Dateline and its “To Catch a Predator” segment, which became a peculiar pop culture phenomenon from the years 2004-2007. Journalist Chris Hansen and his crew would entrap men with actors pretending to be underage, and once the men arrive looking for sex, Hansen would confront them with a brief interview before their arrest. Because the men are sexual predators, there was a joyful glee for the audience in seeing them humiliated. Osit explores this lack of empathy and how it was produced, using unseen archival footage from the episodes to analyze how the men were portrayed. The film sees the program as part of a larger degradation ritual performed not for justice nor to make the world safer, but for entertainment and simplistic moralizing. In the last act of the film, Osit makes himself a character, examining his own history of abuse and linking it to his fascination with the program, a reflexive turn that culminates with his interview with Hansen. The result is an unsettling mediation on criminality and the desire to vilify, which feels more relevant to the cruelty of the current moment than the more immediate social issue films.

Figure 7:

La Jetée, the Fifth Shot

Overall, the quality of the festival’s selections was strong and indicative of the challenging work being done in the medium of non-fiction globally, with a breadth of diverse approaches and subject matter. I will conclude with a brief mention of a few other notable works that merged the personal and political with a reflexive look at the medium itself, representing DMZ’s broader vision. Raoul Peck’s closing film Orwell: 2+2=5 uses voiceover from Orwell’s personal writings mixed with a vast number of clips from film adaptations of his work and other thematically related texts, a grim reflection on how prescient Orwell’s ideas have come to be. 93-year-old Alexander Kluge’s Primitive Diversity is one of the few interesting examinations of AI technology, looking back at early cinema and viewing AI as a continuation rather than a break with the past. Finally, my personal favorite of the festival might have been Dominique Cabrera’s La Cinquième Plan de La Jetée (La Jetée, the Fifth Shot) (2024), in which the director’s cousin believes he recognizes himself and his parents at Orly airport in the fifth shot of Chris Marker’s landmark short La Jetée (1962), sparking an investigation into the history of the film’s making as well as that of the pied-noir community of which her family belonged. Cabrera blends cinephilia, memory, politics, and a reflexive awareness of images in a film worthy of Marker himself and indicative of the diverse areas in which non-fiction filmmaking can explore.

The present research has been conducted with a Research Grant from Kwangwoon University (2025).

Author Biography:

Marc Raymond is a Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Kwangwoon University in Seoul, South Korea. He is the author of the book Hollywood’s New Yorker: The Making of Martin Scorsese (SUNY Press, 2013) as well as numerous articles on Scorsese, Hong Sang-soo, and Korean cinema, appearing in journals such as Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Film Criticism, Film History, New Review of Film and Television, Senses of Cinema, and Style.

Notes

1. Nick Fraser, Say What Happened: A Story of Documentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 2019), 6. ⮭ ⮭
2. The Busan International Film Festival was first held in 1996 and just celebrated its 30th anniversary. The DMZ festival was first held in 2009, with this year’s edition year 17. ⮭
3. “Frontier Competition” (The DMZ International Documentary Film Festival Official Website): https://dmzdocs.com/eng/addon/00000001/program_view.asp?c_idx=275&QueryYear=2025&QueryType=B&QueryStep=2 (accessed October 17, 2025) ⮭
4. “Verite Competition” (The DMZ International Documentary Film Festival Official Website): https://dmzdocs.com/eng/addon/00000001/program_view.asp?c_idx=277&QueryYear=2025&QueryType=B&QueryStep=2 (accessed October 17, 2025) ⮭
5. K-Number had a short theatrical run before the DMZ festival in the summer of 2025 in South Korea, with over 6000 total admissions: https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/films/index/filmsView.jsp?movieCd=20244540 (accessed October 17, 2015) ⮭
6. Cho Jin-seok (author’s interview) (September 25, 2025) ⮭
7. I did not see the Korean Competition Grand Prize winner, Seol Suan’s Ma-dang-i Du Gae-in Jip (A House with Two Yards). ⮭
8. With Hasan in Gaza (Director’s Note) (The DMZ International Documentary Film Festival Website) https://dmzdocs.com/eng/addon/00000001/program_view.asp?m_idx=103158&QueryYear=2025&c_idx=275&QueryType=B&QueryStep=2 (accessed October 17, 2025). Aljafari has gone on to make many experimental, activist films over the past two decades. ⮭
9. Bani Khoshnoudi (author’s interview) (September 30, 2025) ⮭
10. The International Competition Grand Prize went to Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s Jörðin undir fótum okkar (The Ground Beneath Our Feet). ⮭
11. Sara Khaki (filmmaker Q & A) (DMZ International Documentary Film Festival) ⮭
12. Damian Paletta, “Pardoned Jan. 6 Rioter Sells Flags and Shirts Outside Army Festival,” The Wall Street Journal (June 15, 2025) https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-protests-military-parade/card/pardoned-jan-6-rioter-sells-flags-and-shirts-outside-army-festival-ta84scPsfLHXs14dUrrQ (accessed October 17, 2025)