CANBERRA’S enticingly-named “Stronger Than Fiction” documentary film festival has a reputation for being up-to-date, but its directors, Deborah Kingsland and Hannah de Feyter have outdone themselves this year.

Their two opening films, “House of Splinters” and “Navalny” focus on Ukraine and Russia, but if you believe the directors, it’s tragic serendipity rather than genius that led to the timely programming.

I caught up with co-director, Hannah de Feyter, who tells me they started “Stronger Than Fiction” in 2013, but after having to cancel it in 2020, decided to run it as a monthly series instead, a family and covid-friendly initiative that won them a Canberra Critics Circle award.

“It was more covid safe and more flexible,” she says. “Normally the annual festival would have been in August, but was the week of lockdown in 2021, so it was a good decision to reschedule our films.”

The other compelling factor was that the audience loved the series format especially after isolation and the idea of having a monthly gathering in a “community” that could chat about the movies meant that 85 per cent of audience members surveyed preferred the series format.

“During festivals people will say: ‘I wish I could see them all,’ but this way you can,” she says. 

De Feyter is very quiet about what’s coming up after the two June films, but I manage to twist her arm a little.

This year, for the first time, they’ve programmed a Japanese movie, one from Georgia (not the US state but the Caucasian country) and, most exciting of all, a new film from Rakhine State in Myanmar.

That last film, “Midwives”, which screened in the Sundance’s documentary competition this year, is the debut feature for Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, a female director from Rakhine State and features an unlikely collaboration between two women – one Buddhist and one Muslim – in a Rakhine State village.

As for the two opening films, both were programmed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

“I know it seems very deliberate but it’s quite coincidental,” de Feyter says.

First up is opening night film “A House Made of Splinters” directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, which follows three children growing up in care on the front line of eastern Ukraine.

“You might think it intersects with politics, but it’s actually a look at a better world, seen through the eyes of childhood. A documentary is a form of response to things that go on in the real world,” de Feyter says.

“Navalny”, directed by Daniel Roher, is a case in point. Another Sundance hit, it revolves around Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt by poisoning, and his trial, taking us inside the story, “real fly-on-the-wall stuff,” she says.

At one level it’s a fast-paced political thriller, but the extremes in the movie seem so ludicrous and so fake that it seems “stranger than fiction” while giving a sense of the context by showing a team of journalists and data collectors following the case.

“You’ll say to yourself: ‘Oh, my god’,” de Feyter says.

“Stronger Than Fiction”: “A House Made of Splinters”, 4.30pm, June 18 and 12.30pm, June 26; and “Navalny”, 11.45am, Sunday, June 19, and 9.15pm, June 21. At Dendy.