Business Doc Europe

The Polish feature documentary Closure tells the most desperate of personal stories, that of a dad searching for his lost son. “This film became one of the most challenging I’ve made on every level, because it required holding two impulses at once,” says director Michał Marczak. “On the one hand, I wanted to keep the crew minimal and intimate. On the other hand, I wanted the film to carry an epic scope, to convey emotion through images and atmosphere, through showing rather than telling.”

In his new doc series, the first part of which world-premieres in Sundance Episodic, Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard chronicles the decade-long legal battle between the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev over the enormous mark-ups that Bouvier applied to the sales. “I trust neither of them and never trusted them. They play a billion-dollar game that complicates things for everyone,” Dalsgaard tells BDE.

For 10 years, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes followed Isra’a and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, as they were forced to navigate war, exile and emotional anguish. As we see in the film, selected for Sundance World Documentary Competition, characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” co-director MacInnes tells Business Doc Europe.

The first major doc fest of the year, and screening over 150 films from 35 countries, the 8th edition of Biarritz-based FIPADOC kicks off January 23, running to January 31. Additionally, Industry Days, a key event in the local and international doc calendar will see a gathering of France’s foremost docmakers, producers, broadcasters and industry professionals. FIPADOC boss Christine Camdessus discusses her festival’s offer, both for public and professionals, with BDE.

Mark Cousins is back in Sundance with yet another magnum opus, this time telling the history of the doc genre. Park City will present the first part of what will eventually be a 16-hour odyssey. Cousins’ “impulse” was to communicate to audiences his own sense of wonder about all the documentaries that have enraptured him over the years. “The magic is out there. There’s a world outside ourselves which is so complex - a full spectrum of everything we can imagine - the joys and sorrows of being alive,” he tells BDE.

UK producer Beth Earl talks to BDE about Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s highly creative feature doc on the late Marianne Faithfull, which world-premiered at Venice 2025 and is now selected for Sundance. “I think that there is this moment now in our culture where we're re-examining how people are remembered, and who should be remembered and why are they remembered and what we remember them for,” Earl tells BDE of the film’s illustrious subject.

Valley of the Heart (CZ) tells the story of Purna between the ages of 24 and 33. He is a young man who has grown up in a secluded valley deep within Nepal, but he longs for escape. When his father dies, he leaves the valley for the first time to settle in the Czech Republic. “The emotions of beginning anew, of estrangement and adaptation, are deeply familiar. I believe that whatever melancholy emerges from this dimension of the story will be balanced by the vitality of the courtship scenes and the cultural collisions that ensue,” producer Jiri Konečny tells BDE.

What if the Iran-Contra affair had turned out differently forty years ago? Would there be peace in the Middle East now? Tal Barda’s Israeli/German three-part series Strings of Power poses this question. With “incredible” access to some of those involved, director Barda unearths archive footage and documents, alongside new material that has come to light. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

“What initially began as a portrait of loss and transformation is now evolving into something luminous, where life, resilience, and affection create space for hope,” says producer Estephania Bonnett (Playlab Films, Barcelona) of her latest project, Captain. Currently in production and pitching this week during FIPADOC Pro Industry days, the film records a farewell between a father suffering from Alzheimer’s and his daughter (director Laura Otálora).

Jane Ray, Artistic Director of The Whickers, presented January 28 findings of her organisation’s eighth Cost of Docs survey to the professional audience at FIPADOC in Biarritz. The report includes revelations and insights about the use of technology and AI within the doc industry, positive and negative experiences in co-production, and the ever-present concern around funding. Before her presentation, Ray spoke exclusively to BDE.

After the December 2025 announcement to cancel its 2026 edition, Sunny Side of the Doc will return to La Rochelle (France) from 22 to 24 June 2026 with a new format in partnership with Documentary Campus. “Together with Documentary Campus, we are reinforcing our role as a key marketplace while creating fresh opportunities for the professionals who firmly stood up for it," says Aurélie Reman, Sunny Side MD.

Directed by acclaimed Belgian filmmaker Pieter-Jan De Pue, Mariinka will celebrate its world premiere at the CPH:DOX 2026 opening gala in the concert hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music on March 10 at 19:00, in the presence of the director and the film crew, including two of the main protagonists in the film. The 23rd edition of CPH:DOX will take place March 11–22 in Copenhagen.