Film Programme

The award decided by you, our amazing audiences. Each feature film premiering at Sheffield DocFest is eligible for this award, and every festival-goer is eligible to vote. Find out which film is this year's audience favourite! This is your chance to watch this year's winner.

Three filmmakers confront systems of violence and erasure, revealing how images, resistance and truth-telling become tools for survival, exposure and defiance.

Across continents and generations, four films uncover the burdens and bonds of inheritance, where memory, myth and survival shape what families choose to remember or forget.

Experience a captivating journey through Italy's history with this collection of rare Historical Luce Archive shorts, beautifully reimagined with vivid color and evocative, contemporary musical scores.

Three films follow lives shaped by care and connection across farms, flights and fairs, where animals and humans share fragile bonds of growth, loss and belonging.

Three intimate journeys through grief and remembrance where art, rituals and hope become a way of holding those still missing close.

Three stories of queer resilience trace the search for safety in homes, music and asylum centers, where identity, community and survival collide.

From Texas classrooms to neurodiverse self-discovery and a particular Italian youth community, three films explore how young lives adapt, resist and redefine what it means to belong.

From frontlines to exile, two Syrian stories of friendship and loss reveal the quiet endurance of memory, resistance and the search for home.

Three films explore belief and resistance through healing rituals, feminist defiance and ancestral memory, where the sacred becomes a space of struggle, identity and transformation.