Business Doc Europe

Fourteen Dutch documentary projects, twelve of which are at advanced stage, will be presented during the second edition of NLWave (September 30 to October 2), an initiative of the Netherlands Film Fund and presented in co-operation with SEE NL. The 2026 showcase comprises a who’s who of top Dutch creative and business talent, and presents a wealth of fascinating stories that span the globe. Simone van den Broek, Head of Documentary and Fiction at the Netherlands Film Fund, guides Business Doc Europe through this year’s selection.

World-premiering in Utrecht, Joeri Pruys’s Final Cut looks at how the provocative TV show Body Art, made by Pruys’s father in the 1970s and starring the then little-known Serbian artist Marina Abramović, turned into one of the most notorious cases in the history of Dutch censorship. “The rules around who is actually the owner of this material are very vague,” Pruys tells BDE. “That is why in the film I am also saying it is my heritage, so I should be able to do with it whatever I want, because my father created this. It’s Marina’s work as well, so she should be free to use it.”

Ahead of the 15th Finnish Film Affair, running September 23 to 25, Head of Industry Lydia Taylerson answers questions posed by Business Doc Europe. During the event, eight documentary feature projects will be pitched to the professionals in attendance. “In all honesty, I think Finland's unique selling point is the lack of hierarchy within the film industry here,” Taylerson says. “Anyone who attends Finnish Film Affair also feels that. You can be a producer just starting out in your career, and over morning coffee be chatting with senior programmers of Tribeca or SXSW.”

Oscar-winning US director Alex Gibney talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the September 30 UK release of Knife, about the shocking onstage attack on Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022. “He comes out of all of this learning all sorts of life lessons and not being mired in bitterness, resentment and hate,” Gibney observes of Rushdie. “He was certainly haunted and debilitated mentally by the attack, and he had to get that strength back. The only way he knew to do it was to push through.”

The industry programme of Nordisk Panorama kicks off in earnest this weekend, heralding 5 days of intense pitching, deal-making, networking and debate in the Swedish city of Malmö. The Forum runs 20-22 September, while the market kicks off September 18. As healthy as the Nordic doc industries are, NP’s Lea Maria Strandbæk Sørensen underlines to BDE how its professionals must look beyond their regional partners to ply their trade. “No-one is served by being self-sustained within the bubble, never looking out, and never collaborating with anyone else," she stresses.

Afsaneh Salari’s new feature documentary Tehran, Under the Skin scrapes away at a side of Iranian life you won’t see in many other documentaries, namely the booming world of cosmetic surgery. Thousands of Iranian women every year are heading to surgeries to get noses sculpted, stomachs tucked, breasts lifted or skin tightened. The film, sold by CAT&Docs, has its world premiere in TIFF Lightbox this weekend. Director Salari talks to BDE.

Indonesia-based Dutch actor Hans de Kraker has long been the go-to face of white colonial villainy on Indonesian film sets. But when he receives a suitcase of old family belongings from his sister, Hans uncovers a highly unnerving truth - his late father had committed terrible atrocities during his service in Indonesia. “In its own unique and highly visual way, Penjajah fits seamlessly into the current decolonisation debate by revealing different perspectives on a controversial chapter in European history,” Esther van Driesum of Dutch production company BIND tells BDE.

After their 2022 Berlinale Documentary Award-winning Myanmar Diaries, the Myanmar Collective returns with their hybrid work What Happened to My Country, What Happened to Me? With most members of the Collective now living in exile in Germany, Sweden and Thailand, the film is both a testimony of Myanmar’s continuing tragedy and an imaginative reflection on loss, displacement and the enduring search for home. “This is cinematic storytelling, patiently and carefully framed cinema,” producer Corinne van Egeraat (ZINDOC) and DOP/Editor Petr Lom tell BDE.

“In Your Shadow is vital because it makes visible something that exists in so many families and societies: the silence that grows around trauma,” Dutch producer Renko Douze (Een van de jongens) tells BDE of Thabi Mooi & Tom Fassaert’s work-in-progress In Your Shadow, presented at NLWave26. In the feature doc, after thirty years of silence, filmmaker Thabi takes her father on a journey to confront his past as a soldier in the South African liberation struggle.

“Paradise Morbid is a horror-hybrid documentary that focuses on what happens when you get lost in drug use,” director David-Jan Bronsgeest tells BDE of his NLWave feature doc presentation. The film centres on Frank van der Meer (63), once a king of Amsterdam’s Red Light district, “who has died many times, yet refuses to stay buried.” Bronsgeest further underlines his intentions: “With Paradise Morbid, I want to use the language of horror to explore reality.”

“We see this film as a love story set against the backdrop of an unequal and absurd world,” producer Ilja Roomans (Docmakers) tells BDE of director Suzanne Raes’s new feature doc project, presented this week in Utrecht. The film follows a couple, Paul and Daniel, working as cleaners in the Netherlands, who must return to Manila. The film describes “a world in which one country’s largest export may be its labour force, and in which the other country increasingly treats these people as second-class citizens,” Roomans adds.

“As a Palestinian born and raised in exile, this film could have been my life,” says Sakir Khader of his feature debut, produced by mint film office, which follows three men as they fight Assad’s occupation of Syria, and then afterwards during the country’s uneasy peace. “Many war films focus on the moment of battle, placing the viewer at the heart of the fighting. Few films show the everyday reality of life on the front lines or the ruins that remain after liberation, as mine does.”