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.

“Sketches that were never meant to appear in a film form the backdrop for texts written a hundred years ago by the Dutch writer Nescio,” producer Paul Ruven (Talent United) describes to BDE the new project by the maverick Dutch pairing of Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. “By bringing Nescio’s themes into dialogue with contemporary lives and landscapes, they’ve created a film that is both reflective and immediate: a cinematic essay about shifting realities, generational change and the fragile things that still offer us orientation.”

Menno Otten’s latest feature documentary was inspired by a psychosis he observed in his brother, and the sense of calm the man derived from obsessively watching people from his window, finding solace in their seemingly serene gazes. In Still City, Amsterdam is revealed through the gestures of its residents, using 125 years of archival film. “As a city symphony, the film explores our longing for stillness amid the chaos of life,” says director Otten, “revealing what lies behind these moments of quiet and the shared humanity that connects us.”

After losing irreplaceable moments on a hard disk, filmmaker Robert-Jonathan Koeyers returns with his family to the locations they visited to fill in the gaps, all the time recording the process. The film is produced by Richard Valk of Valk Productions. “We are out to make an eclectic, kaleidoscopic film that positions itself as a documentary, an essay film, a fictitious reconstruction of memories, and with several animations to serve as the glue keeping it all together,” Valk tells BDE.

“Since the full-scale invasion, I have experienced what it’s like when a language becomes contaminated,” says Dutch director Aliona van der Horst of her new film, about a bi-lingual Ukrainian couple living in exile in Berlin, and the strain placed on their 45-year marriage. “Russian has become the language of the former coloniser of Ukraine: the language of Putin, the perpetrators, the murderers.”

Is there a more famous Dutch export than Vincent van Gogh? The Impressionist painter and his masterworks were ignored during his short, feverish life, and he died in total obscurity. Which is where he may have remained, had his visionary sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger not recognised his genius, and vowed to proclaim it to the world. BDE canvasses Dutch production company 100%’s Sandra Bolz about the new feature doc which tells Johanna’s hitherto untold story.

Indonesia-based Dutch actor Hans de Kraker has long been the go-to face of white colonial villainy in Indonesian films. 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.