Business Doc Europe

Marcin Borchardt explains to BDE what led him to make his new feature documentary My Themersons, about the life and work of artists and filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. “What moves me most…generally is their refusal to separate intellectual life from emotional life,” Borchardt says. “Stefan could write highly sophisticated philosophical texts and at the same time produce works full of absurd humour, tenderness and vulnerability. They were both profoundly serious and profoundly playful at once. That combination is extremely rare.”

Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert talk to BDE about their new doc which, in turn, focuses on the work of a rehabilitation centre for victims of war, a Ukrainian transgender artist and dancer now living in Poland, and the Open Group artistic collective that explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian civilians. “I think we were quite sensitive observers,” says co-director Englert who, with Szumowska, learned the power of quiet observation when studying film in Łódź. “That’s the way of storytelling we always favour. Without words, you can say a lot.”

In their feature documentary Ice Women, selected for DOK.fest Munich, Jens Becker and Dorothea Braun set out to challenge the male-dominated story of Arctic exploration by shining the spotlight on the courage, resilience, and scientific contributions of women in the far North. For Braun, it all started with an old photograph of a woman in Arctic clothing wearing rifle. “I remember thinking: Why don’t I know her? Why have I never heard about women like her? The more I searched, the more I realized that the absence was not accidental.”

One of eccentric artist Arek Pasożyt’s pet obsessions is to find traces of the Tatra Mountains Panorama, a long-lost massive painting from the 1890s that was 115 metres long and 16 metres high - but that was broken up. In Bigger Picture, world-premiering at MDAG, Polish director Mikołaj Janik follows Arek on this journey. The artist is strongly left-wing, Janik tells BDE. He doesn’t believe in consumer culture, and he is relentlessly cheerful, refusing to become downcast about setbacks. He further likens him to an ancient knight on a heroic quest, or to “some kind of Indiana Jones…”

The Spanish Civil War has a strong personal resonance for director Ricardo Iscar. Back then, four bodies of workers murdered by the Falangists were buried in a field owned by his family in Salamanca. In the documentary, these bodies are finally being exhumed, and Iscar is there to film the process. Seeing how viciously the war divided Spain in the 1930s, Iscar has a warning for viewers: “Nothing is guaranteed. The democracy and civil rights we have, we have to fight to keep them…”

In María Molina Peiró’s Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), a remote robot searches a distant planet both for minerals and signs of life, while far way, beside one of the oldest mines in the world, inhabitants live surrounded by mountains of mineral waste under which are buried both towns and memories. “The main protagonist of this place [is] not even the people or the landscape, but its ecosystem that extends far beyond its own physical and temporal frontiers or limits,” says director Molina Peiró.

No Friend but the Mountains wins the DocsBarcelona Award for Best Project. Crossed wins the 3Cat Award for Best Project, the highest-value award at DocsBarcelona Pro (15,000 euros). My Sister Gaza won the ARTE European Talent Development Award and the Al Jazeera Documentary Co-production Award for Best Forum Project, each valued at 10,000 euros. All awards…

In Lucía Flórez’s feature doc project, a boy from a fishing family and a pioneering female marine scientist set out to tag whale sharks for the first time in Peru. Together they forge an unlikely bond, reshaping both the fate of the species and the boy’s future. “We started working on this film in 2023, we are currently in production, and we want to complete the film by the end of 2027,” the director told the Barcelona audience. “We think that by connecting a young protagonist's journey with a scientific and conservation story, we invite audiences to see the complexity of how we relate and coexist with the ocean.”

“It's a film about someone who turned tragedy into a driving force,” Polish director Dorota Roś told the professional audience during her pitch for the feature documentary Diary of Experiences, produced by Telemark. It is a film that details a man’s determination to speak again, through AI, after losing his voice to larynx cancer. For Konrad, the quest is not just about restoring speech, it’s also about reclaiming intimacy, belonging and identity.

Siblings Mohamed Jabaly, Rima Jabaly and Ibrahim Jabaly made a highly emotional presentation of their feature doc project My Sister Gaza during the Public Pitch session of DocsBarcelona. In the film, as bombs fall over Gaza, Rima and Ibrahim find in filmmaking a way to document their family’s displacement, capturing months of struggle to survive and the shattering of lives. Meanwhile a desperately worried Mohamed, in exile in Norway, stays in daily contact. The project is described as “a raw, intimate story of war, love, resilience, and the unbreakable bonds of family.”

Before the Fire follows a Mapuche community in southern Argentina defending their ancestral land and traditions. Their daily life is shattered when hired killers murder one of their members, igniting a struggle for memory and justice. “Crafting a narrative in which a people such as the Mapuche recount their struggle to ‘be’ and, at the same time, to ‘reclaim’ their territory, is not only relevant to Argentina but also to a concept of ‘community’ that is becoming increasingly urgent in the world we inhabit,” says German co-producer Natalia Imaz of parabellum film.

“Invisible Traces aims not only to shift the perception of ala kachuu (bride kidnapping) from a normalized ‘tradition’ to a recognized form of gender-based violence, but also to validate the lived experience of those affected,” renowned docmaker Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva tells BDE of her new feature project. When a theatre performance about bride kidnapping comes to a Kyrgyz village, 78-year-old Asylkan, abducted at 18, steps into the performance and changes its course…