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.

Syrian documentary The Other Side of the Sun, directed by Tawfik Sabouni, has been selected as Syria's submission for the 99th Academy Awards. The decision marks the country's first entry since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, positioning the film at a moment of profound political and cultural transition. Andana Films, which handles worldwide sales to the film, also announced that New York based Icarus Films has acquired US rights to the film.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers (WCSFP) has announced the nominees for nine of its 16 Buzzies Awards categories. This year sees the introduction of the Best Digital-First category, marking a significant expansion of the Buzzies Awards to recognise digital-first storytelling. Both Best Digital-First and Best Short Form attracted exceptionally strong levels of submissions, “underlining the scale, ambition and importance of creator-led factual content,” organisers write.

“It's a film made together with people, by people, at opposite ends of the global value chain,” Dutch producer Lea Fels told the professional audience at NLWave of the new project The Dawn of the Post Plantation, co-directed by Congolese artist and activist Ce'dart Tamasala together with maverick Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens. “The ones who work the plantation for almost nothing and the ones who make critical art in museums that were historically funded by the wealth taken from those same plantations. And that's where the real friction lies.”

After his debut Four Journeys, the opening film of IDFA 2021, Chinese filmmaker Louis Hothothot again turned his camera inward, his focus once more on his family following the death of his father in 2022. “The central question was how to take care of my mother who is weak, and how to collaborate with my sister who has had a bad relationship with me for a long time,” Hothothot described the work-in-progress to the professional audience in Utrecht. “And underneath, it is about the bigger picture about the women's condition in China.”

MIA returns to Rome from 19 to 23 October with a new market layout that “transforms historic Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini into a district dedicated to the international film and audiovisual industry, fostering encounters between creativity, industry, finance and innovation,” MIA writes. Doc projects are in the frame at the Co-pro Market and the Italians Doc It Better pitch event, while doc-related issues will be discussed and analyzed during the MIA Conference.

“Kabul, Year Zero is the final film in Aboozar Amini’s Kabul trilogy, following Kabul, City in the Wind and Kabul, Between Prayers. But this time, the perspective shifts radically. The story of Kabul and its wars is told through children,” Chinese-Dutch film producer Jia Zhao (Silk Road Films) tells BDE in Utrecht during the second edition of the Dutch project showcase NLWave. “Their voices form a kind of collective chant - not a political shout - about growing up amid repeated cycles of war.”