Double Exposure Film Festival (DX), the United States’ only film festival dedicated exclusively to investigative cinema, returns on November 5 and runs through November 8. This year’s festival theme, On the Record: Evidence in an Age of Doubt, is woven throughout with a smartly curated slate of films that confront the urgent issues of our time and speak to the current assault on democracy at home and abroad.
The festival will open its twelfth year on November 5 at 6:15 pm with the U.S. premiere of Andreas Dalsgaard’s The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. In this documentary, a Swiss art dealer sets out to build the finest private art collection in the world for a Russian oligarch. Their falling out brings to light a secretive world of hidden assets and rare glimpses of breathtaking masterpieces otherwise hidden away in “freeport” vaults, never seen by the public. The film will screen at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center theater (555 Pennsylvania Ave., NW). The screening will be followed by a talkback by Dalsgaard and an opening night party.
The festival’s Friday night Spotlight Selection is My NDA. The film is a 2026 American documentary film directed and produced by Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor. It follows three people bound by non-disclosure agreements, exposing how the contract is weaponized. What emerges is a portrait of corporate secrecy working as a psychological weapon, and of the toll it takes on the people bound by it. Part legal thriller, part intimate portrait, My NDA shows how a simple contract can keep criminal wrongdoing off the record, and what it takes for someone to speak out. The film will screen at 8 pm in the U.S. Navy Memorial Theater (701 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20004).
The festival’s Centerpiece Selection is Kikuyu Land, directed by Andrew Brown and Bea Wangondu. In Kenya’s tea highlands, land seized from Kikuyu families under British colonial rule still grows tea for some of the world’s largest corporations. When a Kikuyu man named Mungai brings a legal petition against the British Crown and the tea industry to reclaim his family’s ancestral land, Nairobi journalist Bea Wangondu sets out to cover what looks like a long-overdue step toward justice. Kikuyu Land will screen on Saturday night, November 6 at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center theater at 6:30 pm.
Double Exposure’s Closing Night film is Marisa Fox’s My Underground Mother. The film is a gripping documentary feature that explores the daring sisterhood and hidden traumas of survivors of Jewish women’s camps during the Holocaust through a daughter’s unraveling of the stories her mother never told. What follows is a reporter’s work as much as a daughter’s: combing archives, following faint trails through records that official histories overlooked, and finding women across continents who had their own reasons to stay silent. The film will screen on November 8 in the U.S. Navy Memorial, followed by Q&A with director Marisa Fox-Bevilaqua, moderated by Franklin Foer, staff writer for The Atlantic.
Other timely and important titles on this year’s slate include: My Brother’s Killer by Rachel Mason—a film that looks back at the brutal killing of gay adult film performer Billy London. Crime & Parody from Will Thwaites is about an Ohio comedian who made a Facebook page spoofing the police department in his hometown of Parma. Officers responded by ramming into his home with guns drawn, jailing him and charging him with a felony that carried up to 18 months in prison. In Shakiba Adil & Elina Hirvonen’s The Secret Reading Club of Kabul, the Taliban’s return to power after the American withdrawal leaves Afghan women diminished and shuttered: barred from secondary school, university, and much of public life. In Kabul, a small group of young women meets anyway, in secret, to do something now forbidden to them: read together. In Ian Urbina’s Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean, the high seas are too vast to police and answer to no single government. For more than a decade, Urbina has reported from that lawless expanse, documenting sea slaves, oil dumpers, mercenaries, poachers, vigilante conservationists and stowaways cast adrift. Rhapsody will play alongside Sine Plambech’s Rescue in its U.S. premiere. The film follows the saga of a Libyan family crammed onto a refugee boat. Urbina, whose reporting team had also been abducted in Libya, will do a combined Q&A with the Andreas Dalsgaard, producer of Rescue.
Other urgent selections include the U.S. premiere of In The Sludge War, Galassia Grassetto thought she had moved to a quiet, safe California neighborhood. Through an odd smell she followed from her house to the surrounding streets, she learned what lay beneath it: treated sewage sludge, the material regulators and industry call biosolids and spread on farm fields, parks and gardens across the country. Supporters say land application returns valuable nutrients to the soil. Grassetto wanted to know what else comes with them. Her questions turned into a five-year, ten-state investigation. Finally, in Pegah Ahangarani’s Rehearsals for a Revolution, an Iranian exile living in London turns the camera on the people who shaped her: five relatives and mentors, each embodying a different way of resisting.
“The films on Double Exposure’s slate for 2026 share one thing in common,” said Diana Jean Schemo, founder and director of Double Exposure. “Someone decides the official account isn’t good enough, and they set out to find and tell the rest of the story–whatever the cost.”
Double Exposure is also partnering with DC Public Library to present free programming for the festival’s 12th edition. The Library will host short-film screenings and audience conversations with filmmakers. Two sessions on November 7 at the Library will show residents how to find and use archived records. Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, will lead “Restoring Reality: A Wayback Machine Deep Dive,” and “The People’s Archive: What’s In It, How to Use It,” will explore the Library’s historical photographs, civic documents and other sources for research, family history and documentary projects.
Beyond the events at the library, this year, Double Exposure has redesigned its professional symposium as a public forum that shares investigative practices with general audiences. Across the forum, participants can explore how communities investigate local stories, how to request public records and document events, and how to detect doctored images and video before sharing them. A full schedule of the public forum can be found at this link.
Double Exposure is a project of the investigative news organization 100Reporters. Film and Forum passes are available now, as are individual tickets.. Additional film titles and the shorts slate will be announced next week. For more information about Double Exposure films, events, and guests, please visit: dxfest.com
