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.

This year’s DOK Industry programme will be jam-packed with animation, not just to complement the festival’s programming line, but also “to establish DOK Industry as a meeting point for the international animated film community,” the festival writes. “Across all parts of the festival, DOK Leipzig is always exploring the boundaries of animation: from animated documentaries via experimental films all the way to the DOK Neuland extended reality exhibition,” organisers add.

CPH:DOX’s international financing and co-production event CPH:FORUM has put out the call for its 2027 edition. The deadline for submissions is November 3, 2026. The Forum will this year place emphasis on doc projects aimed directly at young audiences, and will continues its focus on creative documentary projects that tackle science “in ways that redefine the cinematic language and push the boundaries of what a science documentary can be,” write organisers.

The second edition of NLWave, the Utrecht-based two-day showcase of new Dutch film content, came to a close October 2 following the presentation of 35 early stage projects and works in progress. Fifteen of these were documentaries, some of which seem destined for selection at festivals before the end of 2026, into early 2027. The event attracted 60 industry toppers from the sales, distribution and festival sectors.

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.”