Beyond Borders: Female Voices at the Edge of the Aegean
Croatian film critic Nino Kovačić reports from the 11th Beyond Borders International Film Festival on Kastellorizo, where a diverse documentary competition—and a particularly strong presence of female filmmakers—explored identity, family, displacement, political memory, ecology, and belonging.
Kastellorizo is a small island of intriguing history at the edge of the Aegean Sea, just off the Turkish coast, and the last of the Greek Dodecanese islands. It has hosted the 11th edition of the Beyond Borders International Film Festival, this time unfortunately also under severe budget cuts. Yet, for a week, a small but truly dedicated team, helmed by the passionate festival director Irini Sarioglou, has made this secluded island one of the European hot spots for the wider documentary film community.
18 feature documentary films in the main competition of the Beyond Borders Film Festival represented an eclectic variety of styles and topics, consisting of films created with largely different sets of budgets and professional experiences of the filmmakers themselves. Yet all of the documentaries in the selection have in common an approach of uncompromisingly tackling burning issues and difficult topics, such as displacement, estrangement, non-belonging, identity or misfit coming-of-age, just to name a few. All of this precisely corresponds to the main mission of the festival, which is already stated in its name: to present cinematic worlds beyond the established borders, whatever those may be.
The festival also screened a short documentary film competition, the Micro competition, as well as the Panorama program which, among other films, showcased several films of the acclaimed Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei, who also held a masterclass. Furthermore, the festival this year launched for the first time a Coproduction Development Forum, connecting Greek filmmakers who presented their projects in the making with international documentary film professionals for possible future collaborations. Alongside this new coproduction program, the already established Pitching Lab program continued, although only online due to the already mentioned budget cuts.
Going back to the main competition, which was the program evaluated by the FIPRESCI jury, it is interesting to point out that half of the films, intentionally or not, were made by female directors. And curiously, most of them are highly personal, as the directors are also assuming the roles of narrators, or main characters, or both. French film What Remains of Our Mothers’ Loves, directed by Cathy Dubois, is an intimate voyage of a filmmaker whose father’s absence and her double (French Senegalese) heritage had made her, starting with the mythical figure of the father, research, rethink and recapture her own identity and relationships with her mother and children. The film foremostly tackles the issues of relationships over time and the consequences of family issues that were never faced in the open, but also of interchanging racial and sexual prejudices that had been part of the director’s own life. My Father and Qaddafi by Jihan is another personal story on the figure of a disappeared father, this time intertwined with the turbulent political history of her native Libya. Again, dedicated to the fleeting memory of her father, this documentary is much more politically oriented, considering that the main character was a very prominent Libyan figure of the revolutionary and post-revolution time. In Yrupé, the Spanish film awarded by our FIPRESCI jury, the director Candela Sotos does not search for a father but, in a way, a fatherly figure, her great uncle who was a Spanish scientific cinema pioneer. It is a cinematically playful investigative essay that combines art and cinematic exploration, history and biology, while partly trying to reconstruct the life and ambitions of a revered relative. Further on, perhaps the most emotionally striking in this mentioned block of female directors is the Iranian film Past Future Continuous, co-directed by Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani. In this film the narrator is an Iranian dissident who recollects the relationship with her parents mostly through the footage of surveillance cameras that were installed in their home, so that she could keep a visual account of their every day, as they have been physically separated for decades after her flight. An almost heartbreaking account of aging and loss does not become a sobbing story, but rather intersects with visual poetry which gives it even more emotional vigor. Also, an unusual part of the narrative is the character of the family house, which is given a voice and talks back to the protagonist. This is reminiscent of the previous Khosrovani-directed Radiograph of a Family from 2020. Turkish film Slow Death, by İlkay Nişancı, is also a personally narrated documentary, this time not about family issues, but focused on social and political activism. The director presents a cinematic plea for an ecological disaster that happened in the region of Elbistan, which is gradually being destroyed by two thermal power plants and coal mines. The final film to be mentioned does not fit into the self-narrated style, but is worthy of attention: the Belgian film Fantastique by Marjolijn Prins. The documentary captures a coming-of-age struggle by a 14-year-old girl Fanta from Ghana, who is a performer trying to juggle her underprivileged life situation with an ill mother and a dream of being a high-endurance performer in the most important local group. The film successfully breaks stereotypical Western representations that rely on exoticizing African characters and concentrates on Fanta’s immediate personal longings, making her story appear as if it could be anywhere in the world, yet still fully anchored in her surroundings and life conditions.
Finally, bearing in mind part of the program mentioned in this report, it can be concluded that the festival’s selection this year has definitely been faithful to its initial mission: using documentaries as a perfect medium to go beyond the established borders of many kinds, foremostly personal and social. Beyond Borders is definitely a documentary film festival gem of the Aegean.
Nino Kovačić
© FIPRESCI 2026