Business Doc Europe

In Saudades Eternas, an international premiere in Ji.hlava, French director Emma Boccanfuso follows the remarkable Mother Courage-like Sueli, a flamboyant local woman living in a Rio favela and fighting to hold her extended family together, while running her own makeshift bar and enjoying plenty of gossip with the neighbours. “I very quickly found myself propelled into the heart of the home and the intimacy of this family,” the director tells BDE. “From there, a deep friendship was born, to the point that I have been coming back several times a year to see them for the past ten years.”

Czech filmmaker Filip Remunda has known Blanka Kulová, the daughter of maverick photographer Vlastimil Kula, most renowned for his nude and erotic photography, since they were teenagers. Now, Remunda and Kulová have collaborated on Love Exposed, a “tragicomic documentary” that explores the fiery relationship between daughter and father. By participating in the documentary, through her art and through therapy, she is trying to break a long-lasting cycle of family misery and misunderstanding. “She is fragile but also powerful,” the director says of his collaborator.

In the mountains of Bulgaria is a sprawling hotel that Munich-based property developer Mathias Zeitler has turned into a remote haven for digital nomads. “Everyone in the digital nomad world knew him. I was never interested in the digital nomads, but Matthias himself was the character who was interesting to me,” director Julia Groteclaes tells BDE. The thing is, it took a while for Matthias to understand that Groteclaes wasn’t just there to make a promotional film on his behalf, and that she might actually have an agenda of her own.

German archive doyenne Monika Preischl guides Business Doc Europe through what has come to be known as Archive Day at DOK Leipzig, when the German and European libraries gather to entice filmmakers towards their collections, and when the doc industry meets to interrogate the archive business, its practices and ethics. But first, she offers a corrective…

Cats and dogs feature very prominently in Life Is There, the lyrical and evocative new documentary directed by Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez that receives its world premiere in Ji.hlava’s Opus Bonum competition. “I don’t want human beings in the centre of the story. I think that the animals are living with us,” the director tells BDE. “In the film, I talk about orphans. These animals are also like orphans, in really dangerous situations. I feel a real identification with them…also, I wanted to say that these animals are sacred for me.”

Several years ago, Berlin-based filmmaker Janis Westphal heard about a very unusual housing project in the heart of Berlin Kreuzberg whose residents are homeless alcoholics. Originally founded by a priest, it was one of the first facilities of its kind - a place which followed a radical policy of ‘acceptance.’ In his feature doc Haus der Trinker (Last Round), world-premiering in Leipzig, Janis Westphal tells the story of the establishment, and meets some of its residents. He answer questions posed by BDE.

In Anna Khazaradze’s Berliner, co-produced by German Heino Deckert, we meet Nana, a Georgian immigrant who has lived in Berlin for thirty years, and who translates for newly arrived migrants while navigating her own memories of displacement. “The film’s strongest foundation is the trust I have built with Nana over more than six years,” Khazaradze tells BDE. “The film connects directly with Georgian and German audiences, while its themes of migration, belonging and care are very universal themes.”

Two projects, Folil, A Journey to the Roots by Loreto Plubins, and Snails, directed by Max Kerkhoff, have been selected for the DOK Co-Pro Market. Chile will also be very much present in the DOK Leipzig retrospective ‘Kino und Kampf: Latin America between East and West,’ featuring films related to Chile’s political and cinematic history. “The fact that a Latin American retrospective now includes major historical films from Chile shows how highly our cinema is valued, both in Germany and by the festival itself,” comments Diego Pino Anguita, Deputy Director of Chiledoc.

Five Polish producers will be representing six projects during DOK Industry as part of the Delegation Mix&Mingle/Round Table meetings. In addition, the project The Gap by Paweł Ferdek, will take part in co-pro meetings as part of the DOK Co-Pro Market. Additionally, eight films, five of which are docs, are selected for the festival, including three in International Doc Film Comp: Blossoming by Kamila Serwicka; I’m Painting a Self-Portrait, but All I See Is My Sister’s Face by Helena Stańczyk; and Letters from the Silenced Country by Andrei Kutsila.

One of the completed projects presented at DOK Industry in 2026 is Simone Unger’s debut feature doc Matter and Spirits, selected for DOK Preview Germany and which focusses on three precious objects in a Leipzig museum, giving them voice and tracing their histories back through a colonial past. “The film helps to understand why it is necessary to continue the debate about the colonial heritage and the question of restitution,” says German producer Alexander Tanz of Lumalenscape.

In her highly personal feature documentary, director Annina Lehmann explores the rural landscape of her childhood in Brandenburg, asking people about their fears and longings. Between ethnographic study and a search for home, the film encounters ghost stories, village parties, feelings of loss and craving for connection. “The film grows out of a specific place, and from Annina’s own childhood there,” producer Margarita Amineva-Jester tells BDE ahead of the Oct 26 presentation of the project in Leipzig, “but the emotional and political forces it explores are visible across Europe, the United States and much of the world.”

“Eastkids explores the long-term consequences of reunification through the lives of people who experienced it directly, and a younger generation who inherited its consequences without experiencing it themselves,” German producer Leon Harms tells BDE of Julius Gintaras Blum’s feature doc project, selected for Leipzig’s October 26 pitch event. The doc centres on the city of Chemnitz, once the heartbeat of East German industrialism but which has all but lost its identity post-reunification.