Business Doc Europe

Ukrainian soldiers Shakhta, Potter and Dancer have a very close relationship with death, having returned to the front-line after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “People at war accept [the possibility of] their own death and it really changes you,” Hontaruk elaborates to BDE on the title of her feature documentary, selected for Karlovy Vary. “This transformation is really important and powerful inside a person. It is a key to this film. You need to find your desire to live - and life is stronger than death.”

There is an intriguing absence at the heart of Rosa Friedrich’s hybrid documentary My Friend the Porn Star (screening in Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and sold by New Docs). The director’s friend, the would-be porn star Timo, decided late on during the project that he didn’t want to appear in it any more. Undaunted, Friedrich took the bold decision to keep his body but to use AI to replace his face with that of another man. The director explains more to BDE.

One of the cornerstones of Japanese broadcaster NHK’s offer at Sunny Side 2026 will be its new documentary about the completion of the Tower of Jesus on Antoni Gaudi's spectacular Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. The new film, exec-produced by NHK’s Masumi Hoshino, will premiere in Japan on June 28 before its international roll-out. “The fact that we were granted exclusive access to film the Sagrada Família, and to document its construction continuously over such a long period of time, represents a major strength for NHK,” Hoshino tells Business Doc Europe.

Flemish production house Harald House arrives in La Rochelle with a diverse slate of documentary projects, ranging from a journey into the mind of the late, great David Lynch, to a feature doc about a team of para-cyclists who chase their dream of competing on the world stage, even as bombs descend on their home city of Gaza. “Creatively, we are drawn to films that can have an impact, whether that impact is cultural, artistic or social,” company CEO Kristian Van der Heyden tells Business Doc Europe.

For a while at the end of 2025, the future of Sunny Side of the Doc seemed very much in doubt, but after agreeing a strategic partnership with Documentary Campus, the market returns June 22-24 to La Rochelle for its 37th edition. As ever, the core remit is to connect producers with key decision-makers in order to accelerate co-pro and business opportunities but, as Doc Campus MD Donata von Perfall tells BDE, gone are the pitch events, replaced in 2026 by a “more collaborative, discussion-driven” Meet & Match model. “The goal was efficient, meaningful exchange rather than performance,” she says.

Director River Finlay talks to BDE about her MeetMarket project that follows Chilean Isabel Allende, one of the world’s most widely read authors, as she “looks beyond the stories she tells the world and confronts the ones she tells herself,” and reckoning with an unresolved past, the passage of time, and the renewed rise of authoritarianism. “Her trailblazing as an author for other women writers really is unparalleled, but mostly she really provides this incredible sense of connection and bravery,” says Finlay of her revered subject.

For the third consecutive year, Ji.hlava International Documentary FF will support outstanding auteur filmmaking from Central and Eastern Europe. The new call for applications is now open, with a deadline of August 31. Jihlava's 30th anniversary is reflected in this year's visual identity of rippling waves emanating from a fixed point, which itself points to the festival's core retrospective in 2026 of documentaries whose impact reached far beyond the cinema screen.

Prague-based sales company Filmotor has acquired international sales rights to If Luck Will Come, the debut feature documentary by Danish filmmaker Camille Bildsøe, ahead of its international premiere in the Kids Screenings section of the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The acquisition follows the film's world premiere at CPH:DOX 2026, where it screened in NEXT:WAVE Competition.

World-premiering at Doc Edge (NZ), the feature documentary Return to a Strange Land is described as “a visually striking portrait of the internationally acclaimed choreographer Jiří Kylián and his lifelong muse and love, Sabine Kupferberg… A personal reflection on human existence and the relentless passage of time.” The film is sold by Anisya Kazakova of ANTIPODE Sales International.

The final edition of Sunny Side came to a close June 24. A new international documentary market, supported by the CNC, the City of Strasbourg, the Eurométropole de Strasbourg and the Grand Est Region, will be held in Strasbourg as of June 2027. “After 37 years of championing documentary film, it is time for the long-term future of the documentary market in France to be placed in the hands of the industry itself,” commented Roman Jeanneau, President of Doc Services, which organised SSD since its inception in Marseille in 1990.

CIRCLE Doc Accelerator has unveiled the ten projects chosen for its upcoming edition. The three-module CIRCLE program provides women and gender-expansive filmmakers a space to “nurture their projects, elevate their careers, and navigate existing film power structures.” The programme kicked off June 22 in Edipsos, Greece, continuing through Portorož, Slovenia (October 2026, in partnership with the Slovenian Film Centre) and Trieste, Italy (January 2027, in partnership with When East Meets West).

Billed as a keynote on Global Co-production in an Age of Uncertainty, Danish Helle Faber (Made in Copenhagen) delivered a riveting account of how, together with PINK in Prague, she produced the Oscar-winning Mister Nobody Against Putin by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin. Yes, co-pro can be unbearably frustrating and time-consuming, but this film was different. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin could not have been made by a Danish company alone, nor a Czech company alone. It could only be made because people in different countries chose to share the responsibility, not only for a film, but for a human being,” Faber said.