Business Doc Europe

In Sara Dosa’s new feature doc, produced by National Geographic, selected for IDFA Signed and sure to be a front runner during the upcoming awards season, renowned Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his film archives into a time capsule to hold onto the memory both of his country’s diminishing glaciers and his beloved grandparents. “I think for me, both as a person and a filmmaker, I'm endlessly inspired by the power of nature, and how humans can co-create story and meaning with nature,” Dosa tells Business Doc Europe.

Emmy award-winning artist and filmmaker Tamara Shogaolu returns to IDFA with what she terms “a multi-platform opera experience,” about a Black female influencer living in Amsterdam 400 years ago. It is a project with personal resonance. “Often, it is people of colour who are never ‘European,’” she says. “People of colour and migrant backgrounds are still made to feel they do not belong today, despite having been part of Dutch society and shaping the Netherlands for centuries. That resonates with me in my own experience.”

Love comes at a price in Fernando Souza’s feature doc about host clubs in Tokyo’s Kabukicho red light district. The partly-fictionalised film focusses on Hikaru, a seductive charmer by night, and a bespectacled computer nerd by day, with a girlfriend as well as a strong desire to have kids. “It's very strange, but we ended up getting much closer to reality by fictionalising it than by shooting the real thing,” the director tells Business Doc Europe. “I tried for many, many years to shoot it as an observational documentary. It was impossible.”

The two co-directors, one Dutch, the other Filipino, discuss their feature documentary selected for IDFA Luminous, a love story played out between Amsterdam and The Philippines. “We really had to find a strong partner, and that's what we found in Venice,” stresses Raes, who is no stranger to IDFA having presented many docs there in the past, and whose Close to Vermeer (2023) was in the running for an Oscar® for Best Feature Documentary. “It was really a great joy for me.”

Swiss director Gabriel Tejedor discusses his new feature documentary, in which he goes to the Bulgarian town of Kazanlak, a town not far from Ukraine and home to a weapons factory supplying the frontlines, with the idea of exploring the link between the factory and its townspeople, thousands of whom work there. “I think when you are shooting something, your eyes are always attracted by things you judge as not normal,” the director reflects to BDE. “Weapons were all around! It’s not something we constructed.”

It may read like the plot of Local Hero, the classic 1980s British/Scottish movie in which a US oil magnate, played by a benevolent Burt Lancaster, changes his mind about developing a swathe of the beautiful Scottish coastline, after flying in to see it first-hand. But back in the 1960s and 70s, the folk of Whiddy Island and Bantry, in the extreme south-west of Ireland, had an altogether different experience when the oil barons came, one that was to end in tragedy. Irish director Adrian McCarthy discusses his new film Whiddy, world-premiering November 12 in New York, with BDE.

World Congress of Science & Factual Producers (WCSFP) will be heading to Riva del Garda, Trentino, Italy, for its 35th edition from November 8-11, 2027. The annual gathering brings together hundreds of producers, broadcasters, commissioners, distributors, streamers, scientists, digital creators from around the world to explore the latest developments in science and factual storytelling, forge new partnerships and unlock opportunities across the industry. The recently ended 2026 edition ran Nov 9 to 12 in Tallinn.

The awards were handed out in London on November 10 during a ceremony hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and attended by leading filmmakers, producers and executives from Britain and around the world. The BBC picked up four awards, with Netflix winning three awards, and Channel 4 and Sky Documentaries both winning two awards. ITV, National Geographic, Olympics.com and S4C each won in one category.

Chile is set for a busy IDFA with the international premiere of Carmen Castillo’s We Are Still Alive in Signed section, two films in Best of Fests, a further two projects in Forum and a targeted programme of industry events. “The fact that IDFA, one of the world’s most significant documentary film events, is once again recognising and celebrating Chilean filmmaking by including a wide range of films, projects and perspectives from our country in its programme, reaffirms the richness of Chilean documentary cinema,” says Diego Pino Anguita, Executive Director of the Chilean Documentary Corporation.

Marking its 40th anniversary, the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) has revealed its theme and first guest announcements for the milestone edition. One of the Southern Hemisphere’s premier industry events for documentary and factual storytelling, AIDC will return to Sydney for the first time in more than 30 years in 2027, made possible by a new Principal Partnership with the NSW Government through Screen NSW.

Artist Dragana Jurišić’s debut feature doc premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and is produced by Ireland's Invisible Thread Films in co-production with Croatia's Restart, whose documentary Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović won the European Film Award for Best European Documentary in 2026. The Taskovski Films slate also includes IDFA 2025 winner Past Future Continuous and The Netherlands' official Oscar submission Paikar, among others.

Organisers of Cinéma du réel's ParisDOC Works-in-Progress programme have invited submissions for the next edition, running 24-25 March 2027. ParisDOC Works-in-Progress actively supports the distribution, promotion and placement of feature documentaries by linking, at a key stage of the production process, project holders (filmmakers and producers) to industry professionals, organisers underline.