Her Own Witness

Soraya was sixteen when she picked up her phone and began filming her life. An Afghan artist in Iranian exile, she used the camera as the one tool entirely her own. Years later, that footage became a documentary. The impulse behind it became a festival program.

"Female Lens," one of the focal points of Doxumentale 2026, gathers films, books, and podcasts built around a deceptively simple premise: that when women control the narrative, rather than simply inhabit it, what gets seen fundamentally changes. The program spans continents and registers, from the Iranian protest movement to a Jamaican courtroom, from a Kenyan highway to a New York sanitation depot, from the streets of Atlanta to the quiet negotiations of growing up female in contemporary China.

Some of these stories unfold in courtrooms and war zones. Others play out in the cab of a long-haul truck, or in the slow accumulation of a life's artistic work. What holds them together is not subject matter but point of view, told from the inside, where the personal and the political have a way of becoming the same thing.

Many of the directors and protagonists will be in Berlin. The conversation, in other words, is just beginning.