The 36th Message to Man International Film Festival announces the competition programmes

Date of publication: 30 September 2026

The 36th Message to Man International Film Festival announces its competition programmes. From October 16 to 24, 33 films in the International Competition, 19 films in the National Competition, and 23 films in the Experimental Competition In Silico will compete for the festival’s awards.

Authors from different countries and continents will present documentary, animated, fiction, and experimental films to our audiences: stories about people and the world, the past and the future, attempts to redefine the boundaries of genres, reflections on new and old media, cinema, technology, and memory.

The festival is held with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, and the Committee for Culture of Saint Petersburg.

MORE ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

FILM STILLS

ACCREDITATION

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Still from the film Shalom / Shalom. Dir. Meital Zvielli
Still from the film Shalom / Shalom. Dir. Meital Zvielli

 

The films selected for the International Competition will be at the centre of attention for the festival jury and audiences.

“There are many familiar names in the International Competition of the 36th Message to Man. Audiences will be able to see new works by Ben Russell, Burak Çevik, Camille Dumortier, Zhenya Kazankina, Patrick Bura, Georges Schwizgebel, and Ben Rivers. This year, the director of Bogancloch, winner of the Message to Man Award for Best Director, will present his short film The Wind, One Brilliant Day in Saint Petersburg. But there will also be many new encounters. The selection committee is pleased that the competition traditionally includes many debut filmmakers, including filmmakers from Russia. One of the festival’s aims is to expand the cinematic space and help new authors meet their audiences. The geography of the competition is diverse: Europe, North and South America, Asia. Different voices, different languages, different views of the world. And what all the authors have in common is an understanding of the fragility of our shared world. Once again, we are convinced that cinema — documentary, fiction, and animation alike — is an almost ideal form of dialogue. It makes it possible to be heard and understood even on the other side of the Earth. To find someone who understands you. Today, when contradictions are so strong and anxiety is felt so acutely, people need attention more than ever and are waiting for a message from another person. Our festival will do its best to deliver this message to its recipient, overcome borders, and ease isolation. We look forward to Saint Petersburg audiences encountering the films of the International Competition: radical and comforting, accessible and surprising, films that raise questions and invite conversation,” — Vasily Stepanov, Chair of the International Competition Selection Committee.

 

Full-length documentaries:

 

Short documentaries:

  • Sunday. Dir. Giulio Toninchelli, Italy, 2025, 15 min.
  • Another Earth. Dir. Ben Russell, France, 2025, 12 min.
  • Conveyor. Dir. Eginhartz Kanter, Austria, 2025, 8 min.
  • Portales. Dir. Elena Duque, Spain, 2025, 16 min.
  • Slet 1988. Dir. Marta Popivoda, Germany-France-Serbia, 2025, 22 min.
  • Status B. Dir. Gleb Vazhdyaev, Russia, 2026, 19 min.
  • Tripalium. Dir. Chaiyin Rujirathana, Thailand, 2025, 15 min.
  • The Language of Their Dreams. Dir. Sarah Klingemann, France, 2025, 21 min.

 

Short fiction films:

 

Animated short films:

  • God Is Shy. Dir. Josselin Charles, France, 2025, 15 min.
  • Vagabond. Dir. Susa Monteiro, Portugal, 2026, 10 min.
  • Ye. Dir. Anet Akbirova, Russia, 2026, 2 min.
  • Nursing Room. Dir. Kiki Yuan, Scarlett Wang, China, 2025, 5 min.
  • Hugs. Dir. Nicolas Fong, Belgium, 2025, 7 min.
  • Final Party. Dir. Patrick Bura, USA, 2026, 4 min.
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dir. Georges Schwizgebel, Switzerland, 2026, 7 min.
  • Drained. Dir. Teodora Mihăilă, Michaela Daoust, Sara Maria Inoa, Spain, 2026, 5 min.
  • Corpus Christi. Dir. Bea Lema, Spain, 2026, 13 min.
  • Gherking. Dir. Claudius Gentinetta, Switzerland, 2026, 7 min.

 

NATIONAL COMPETITION

Still from the film Make Films / Make Films. Dir. Masha Chernaya
Still from the film Make Films / Make Films. Dir. Masha Chernaya

 

Non-fiction films by Russian authors are always among the most anticipated and audience-oriented programmes.

“Documentary cinema is going through another crisis today. The reserve of trust once extended to it on credit now has to be repaid, and it is still unclear how: image generation, the vast video archives of social media, and all kinds of ways of recording video are constantly expanding the boundaries of what can be considered ‘documentary’. We saw this ourselves while reviewing the submissions. That is why we tried to select films whose directors seek new relationships between documentary imagery and authorial effort, preserve honest relationships with diverse variations of media, and renew or clarify the subject of documentary art. Until there are new rules, the search can grow out of the most unexpected tasks. The relationships between the camera and the person, the director and their ‘subject’, and, more broadly, responsibility, are what unite this year’s selection, extending beyond questions of cinema as an art form. Ethics today is inseparable from poetics,” — National Competition curators Alena Solntseva and Pavel Pugachev.

 

 

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILMS IN SILICO

Still from the film Headworks / Headworks. Dir. Anna Wasoff
Still from the film Headworks / Headworks. Dir. Anna Wasoff

 

The Experimental Competition is the festival’s most unpredictable programme; this year, it could no longer fit into the usual two screenings.

“This year, the Experimental Competition is divided into three screenings, with three main themes emerging: the beauty and pain of its loss, our relationships with ourselves and others, and technology and memory. The programme features many artists already familiar to us: Frank Heath, Anna Wasoff, Mikhail Basov, Nikita Spiridonov, Anton Drozdov-Schatlivtsev, Maxim Yeruzhenets and Marina Kirakosyan, Nicolaas Schmidt, Daniele Grosso, as well as cinema avant-garde classic and our frequent participant and inspiration John Smith. But most of the directors are showing their films in our competition for the first time. Among them are four authors from Saint Petersburg: Alena Tereshko reflects on Rubens’s provocative painting, Roman Mikhailov stages a poetic performance in an ominous space, Dasha Iskrenko discovers invisible stories during a walk along the seashore, and Ksyusha Kernosenko uses a witty cinematic experiment to explore the mechanisms of childhood memory,” — Mikhail Zheleznikov, Festival Programme Director and selector of the Experimental Competition In Silico.

 

 

The 36th Message to Man International Documentary, Short Fiction, Animation and Experimental Film Festival will take place at leading cinemas in Saint Petersburg from October 16 to 24, 2026. The programme features more than 150 auteur films from around the world.

MEDIA ACCREDITATION

The festival will once again welcome members of the press and bloggers to its venues: accreditation is granted on the basis of an application form, which can be completed on the festival website. Applications close on October 14, 2026.

Additional information, comments and interviews:
Elena Barkova, [elena.barkova@gmail.com](mailto:elena.barkova@gmail.com); Mikhail Denezhkin, +79016906941.

The festival Message to Man was founded in 1989 in Leningrad by director Mikhail Litvyakov, who is now the festival’s Honorary President. In 2010, Alexey Uchitel — a director of documentary and fiction films and a People’s Artist of Russia — became the festival’s President.

The festival programme is centred around three competitions. Every year, the selection committee receives several thousand submissions from all continents. More than 150 films participate in the competition and non-competition programmes. Full-length documentaries and short documentary, fiction, and animated films compete on equal terms for the Grand Prix of the International Competition.

Over the years, the festival’s jury members, guests, and participants have included Artavazd Peleshyan, Werner Herzog, Isabelle Huppert, Ulrich Seidl, Paolo Sorrentino, Fanny Ardant, Tonino Guerra, Victor Kossakovsky, Volker Schlöndorff, Agnès Varda, Godfrey Reggio, Emir Kusturica, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Ulrich Gregor, Leo Hurwitz, Gerrit van Dijk, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Alexey Fedorchenko, Mira Nair, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Alexander Sokurov, Semih Kaplanoglu, Abdellatif Kechiche, Bill Plympton, Alan Berliner, Helena Třeštíková, Claude Lanzmann, Richard Leacock, Marina Goldovskaya, and many other filmmakers.