Nana is joined by Ornella Mutoni, documentary filmmaker, producer and curator of the Refugee Week Film Festival, to dive into the 2026 programme.

This year's curated selection of short and feature-length films spans fiction, documentary and animation. Stories range from intimate portraits of life in refugee camps, to a mother preserving her culture in a new country, solidarity found behind immigration detention fences, and the animated journey of two polar bears forced to migrate due to climate change. The films invite reflection, conversation, and connection – whether you watch at home or gather others for a shared screening.

Nana and Ornella discuss how this year's theme of 'Courage' is embodied across the programme, the origins of film festival and Refugee Week, the importance of migrants telling their own stories, and how Ornella selected films which explore the complexities of migration, displacement, joy, grief and resistance from global perspectives.

Ornella also reflects on her path into documentary filmmaking, the sacredness of family archives, and her own documentary The Things We Don't Say, which focuses on complex stories of healing in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, which Ornella survived.

“In this horrible and hostile world, we also get so many horrible messages in the media. Films can allow you to sit with someone's story, and both can be joyful or sad, but allows us to humanise the experience. And in humanising the experience, you get so many different emotions that come through that are different to the kind of horrible rhetoric in newspapers and how they make people just be numbers. I think there's so many universal themes that you could see through the Refugee Week Film Festival."

The Refugee Week Film Festival runs from 15–21 June. All films are free to watch. Find out more and register here.

Watch The Things We Don't Say on Guardian Documentaries. Keep up with Ornella here.

Photo credit: Documentary Film Council