Business Doc Europe

Ethiopian-Israeli Mazal Tazazo survived the Nova festival massacre in southern Israel on October 7 2023 in circumstances that seem close to miraculous. Her story is told in This is NOT a Movie Script, a short film screening online this week as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival. Made by London-based Joëlle Bentolila at Chimaera Films, it is intended as the first in a series of stories that will be put together in feature documentary form. Bentolila talks to Business Doc Europe.

Iraqi filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour has never forgotten the sudden disappearance of her 10-year old friend, Nour. That incident has gnawed away at her for years, even as she has become a very successful filmmaker, producer and actor. She returns to the incident in her haunting debut feature-length documentary, Flana, whose title is Iraqi slang for a forgotten woman - and that’s precisely what Nour was to become. Ghandour discusses her film with BDE.

The Russian filmmaker discusses Trillion, his new and critically lauded documentary, and the second film in his ‘empathy’ trilogy, with Business Doc Europe. The film features, throughout, a mysterious woman who walks barefoot across the coastal terrain, again and again casting a very particular essence into the sea. “From the second I met her, I thought what she does is extraordinary,” Kossakovsky says of the woman whose identity he still refuses to disclose.

In Sien Versteyhe’s new documentary we watch a therapy session within a care centre for survivors of sexual violence. The woman in the film may be traumatised and vulnerable but she is tough, the director underlines. “We are talking more and more about sexual violence, but that we are talking about it in the wrong way,” she tells BDE. “I still feel that. In the stories we see or hear, the perpetrator is almost always the man in the bushes, the monster, and the survivor is always weak. We’re not getting any further than the image of a weak victim in a shower…that’s not the reality.”

In her new feature doc, which world-premieres in Amsterdam, Lynne Sachs sets out to discover why, over the years, receiving business cards from strangers has left such a strong imprint on her consciousness. For her the process was like the tale of Hansel and Gretel. “You leave the crumbs…and they lead you back somewhere…The whole project was to figure out how we are affected by those intersections of our lives with other people's.”

Gianluca Matarrese’s I Want Her Dead is a film about enmity, specifically about two middle-aged women, and both cousins of the director, who simply can’t stand one another. And, no, it wasn’t cathartic or healing for them to have the chance to yell insults so spectacularly. “They still hate each other,” the director tells BDE. “It wasn’t therapeutic at all…but they’re expressing everything they wanted to express.”

A Fox Under a Pink Moon picked up the Best Film in International Competition while Past Future Continuous won Best Film in the Envision Competition. The IDFA Award for Best Directing (worth €5,000) in International Competition went to Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel for The Kartli Kingdom while The IDFA Award for Best First Feature went to Paikar by Dawood Hilmandi. The IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film was won by Maasja Ooms for My Word Against Mine.

The award for Best Doc went to the Georgian film 9-Month Contract, which examines the struggles of a single Georgian mother who turns to surrogacy, and the limits imposed by poverty. The Best Hungarian Film award was given to My Father’s Daughter, a story about the search for a lost sister. The festival continues online until 30 November, including all winning and special mention titles.

The Geneva-based human rights festival unveiled this week the 12 internatonal projects for its Impact Lab training program in 2026. Each project representative will receive expert training to craft an impact strategy ahead of presentation to dozens of NGOs, international organisations and philanthropists, both in Geneva and beyond. The next edition of FIFDH Impact Days runs March 8 to 10 2026.

Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude; Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović; Riefenstahl by Andres Veiel; Songs of Slow Burning Earth by Olha Zhurba and Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza were unveiled November 18 as the five nominees in the European Documentary category of the 38th European Film Awards. All five are also nominated in the European Film category. The winners will be revealed in this year’s award ceremony on 17 January in Berlin.

A 5-day training initiative designed to strengthen the children’s doc sector kicked off November 17 at IDFA, with a cohort of 15 filmmakers from across Germany, Flanders, Poland, and the Netherlands. The stated aim of the program is to ‘foster international co-productions, encourage mutual exchange within the industry, and strengthen the children’s documentary genre as a whole.’

The Whickers announced November 16 that it is increasing its Film & TV Funding Award from £100,000 to £120,000, and its runner-up development award from £20,000 to £25,000. The announcement was made at IDFA during the launch of the organisation’s annual Cost of Docs survey for which filmmakers are invited to share the true cost of documentary production. The deadline for applications for The Whickers Film and TV Fund is January 30, while the deadline to submit responses to the survey is December 16.