In September Moscow and Sochi will host the XXI International Vladimir Menshov "Won Together" Film Festival
The XXI Vladimir Menshov “Won Together” Film Festival announced the program. Creative meetings with documentary filmmakers from all over the world, as well as presentations of their works created in 2025-2026, will be held in Moscow and Sochi from September 14 to 24. The event will bring together documentary filmmakers from more than 40 countries and 39 cities of Russia. Their works reveal the themes of victory in various spheres of life, peacemaking, religious tolerance and humanism.
In 2026, the International Jury of the Film Festival l will be headed by the American historian Peter Kuznik. In addition, for the first time, the prize "Happiness of Victory", established by the information partner of the film forum, the “Aggregator of Happiness” media holding, will be awarded to the authors of films about the power of human hope, the ability to find light even in difficult circumstances and maintain faith in the future.
The Festival venues will include creative meetings with the authors of competitive and non-competitive works, presentations, round tables, open lectures and master classes. The educational block of the festival will be complemented by the “Overcoming” film school for creative youth.
The Moscow venues of the Film Festival in 2026:
House of Russian Abroad: the Struve Hall of the main building of the House of Russian Abroad and the Cinema and Concert Hall (2 Nizhnyaya Radishchevskaya Street); the events of the international competition and creative meetings with festival participants will take place on September 14-17;
House of the Peoples of Russia (Podsosensky pereulok, 21, b. 1); the events of the national film competition will take place on September 15-19;
The All-Russian State Library of Foreign Literature named after M. I. Rudomino (Nikoloyamskaya St., 1); the events of the Chinese and Iranian participants of the international competition will take place on September 15.
The Festival program includes a national competition, which will feature films on historical and modern topics, and an international competition divided into three blocks: "Memory" — works about the events and exploits of the Great Patriotic War and World War II; "Reflection" — films about achievements and overcoming obstacles in the modern world; student documentaries and animation. The detailed information about the event is on the official website of the festival.
The national competition, the jury of which is headed by writer, screenwriter Yuri Polyakov, will include creative meetings and presentations of films: "Life goes On" by Irina Minigaleeva; "Return to the Future. Mariupol Drama Theater" by Alexei Rusinov; "Lugansk" by Pavel Fattakhutdinov; "Yuri Klepikov. Overcoming" Anna Tugareva; "Oh! I caught an atom of the Sun. Oleg Tabakov" by Andrey Istratov; "The Man who Foresaw" by Evgeny Kondrat; "On the Border of two Worlds" by Alexander Negruk and other films.
The program of the international competition includes creative meetings, discussions, audience discussions and other events dedicated to films: "Chat&Rap" by Mohamed Ali Rakshani (Iran); "Flower Hunters" by Pan Zhiqi (China); "Falcons Piercing the Sky" by Hu Yu, Li Jingwei, Xu Jiaxing, Sun Ji, Meng Chunlei (China); "Identification and Memory" Facundo Cantelmi (Argentina/Mexico); "Marathon Mom" by Rebecca Shore, Oren Rosenfeld (Israel); "Emulsion of Time" by Pablo Wong (Costa Rica); "Stream-History" by Amit Duety (India); "Village of Women" by Victorien Vialar (Burkina Faso); "Milk and Honey" by Marko Jukic (Serbia) and many others.
The organizers of the Film Festival are the World Peoples Assembly, the Integration Production Center, the Eurasian Academy of Television and Radio and the Intellectual Resource company. The Film Festival is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
Partners: The Center for Creative Industries of the International Research Institute of Management Problems, the Memory of Victories Foundation, OTR TV channel, Intermedia news agency, Literaturnaya Gazeta, culture portals “Cultura.rf”, "Utro.rf".
Additional information is available on the official websites of the Film Festival and the World Peoples Assembly, as well as at media@world-assembly.org.
The photo archive is provided by the press service of the Film Festival.