The accreditation phase for the 26. Festival Edition is now running! It will take place from 21 – 27. April 2026 in Wiesbaden and other venues in the Rhine-Main region. 

Your festival badge grants entrance to the screenings of festival films in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Mainz, and Giessen, as well as to most of the events in the supporting programme. The prerequisite in each case is that the events are not yet sold out. Some events from the “Kaleidoskop” section may not be included. Your accreditation also gives you access to the goEast online media library containing a selection of our festival films. 

Further information on the current accreditation procedure can be found in our FAQ section. 

You can apply for accreditation exclusively via Eventival, or at short notice during the festival week at our info counter (you may have to expect waiting times). Please also note that we will charge an additional late accreditation fee from April 17. 

We are inviting emerging documentary filmmakers and producers from Central and Eastern Europe to apply for the East-West Talent Lab, which will take place at the 26th goEast Film Festival (21-27 April 2026). The talent program is looking for 12 non-fiction projects in development, as well as for up to 8 producers to apply without a project. The East-West Talent Lab is particularly tailored to the needs of non-fiction and documentary filmmakers. 

Two awards will be given within the East-West Talent Lab 2026:

1. A Research Grant, endowed with 3.500 Euros for an early-stage documentary project focusing on human rights and/or minority rights. 
2. ThePitch the Doc Prize, a training to support the development of the project (value of 500 Euros). 

Deadline for application is February 24th, 2026. 

More details, as well as the entry regulations can be found on the submission form on Eventival. Here you will also find an example of the application documents to be submitted for submissions with a project. 

*Eligible countries for applications with and without a project are Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. 

** A further eligible country for applications without a project (this applies only to producers) is Germany. 

goEast has featured a bespoke competition for virtual reality works since 2018, which has, however, up until now solely shown completed VR projects in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. Now the festival is set to take on a new challenge – with a programme and accompanying competition exclusively intended for work-in-progress and collaborative projects in the fields of virtual and extended reality.

The declared goal here is to promote new talents from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as students from Germany, who are united by a common passion for VR and XR. Within the programme, the selected participants will receive assistance in their search for further opportunities to fund their projects.

In 2023 this programme was made possible for goEast thanks to the support of the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain within the framework of the side programme Cinema Archipelago.