Business Doc Europe

Melbourne-based Chinese director Vee Shi may have set out to make a fictionalised account of the lives of his parents, but the resulting film is as viscerally verité as one can imagine, telling of an unhappy marriage, domestic abuse and having to deal with parental illness and financial struggle. “It's not 100% factual information, but it's an accurate representation of the emotional truth,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

Didier, the central character in The Echo Of The Herd (La voix du troupeau) is like one of those sad-eyed clowns you see in old silent movies. Deaf since birth and still mourning the loss of his brother Claude, he looks for solace in his work on a cattle farm in Auvergne. Now well into middle-age, he still takes a child-like joy in tending the animals and building fences - but when the cattle suffer, so does he. The director pairing of Matthias Joulaud and Lucien Roux discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Amsterdam/Warsaw-based director Piotr Pawlus and Dutch-based producer/co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao discuss their new collaboration, selected for International Competition at Visions Du Réel, about the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion. “The camera was my eyes,” says Pawlus. “It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

Stuck in Berlin after the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Viv Li, who comes from solid, traditional stock back in Beijing, decided to embrace the German capital’s ‘alternative’ culture scene. Her resulting (mis)adventures are as hilarious as they are poignant, especially when seen in counterpoint to her sober, albeit loving, family life back home. “I realised that there is less and less of ‘binary’ in how we live. There are a lot of differences, but in the end, we're the same,” she suggests to Business Doc Europe.

The German filmmaker discusses his new documentary about Germany’s shocking colonialist legacy in Namibia, and how a certain type of latter-day German tourist still makes the local people feel very uncomfortable. As we see in the film, they may seem like genial westerners but they don’t even try to hide their prejudices. “People being racist is something that to me is no surprise at all,” Jonas Spriestersbach tells BDE.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras, who is VdR Industry Special Guest in 2026, tells BDE. Poitras is joined in interview by co-director Mark Obenhaus.

DOK.fest Munich has unveiled the programme for its 41st edition. 106 films from 49 countries will be screened, 23 of which will have their world premiere, and a further 59 films will have their international or German premiere. Films will compete for three main prizes, the VIKTORIAs for International and German Competitions, and for Cinema of Urgency. This year, the programme team selected from 1,440 submissions – a new record for the festival. DOK.fest Munich runs this year May 6 to 18.

Six new Swiss doc projects, ripe for selection at festivals during 2026, will be presented April 22 in Nyon to industry professionals from the international sales, distribution and finance sectors, as well as festival programmers from across the globe. Thirteen more will be presented within the Prix RTS and newly established Migros Culture Percentage Story Lab. What’s more, there’s a hatful of Swiss films across the festival’s competition and non-competitive sections. Swiss Films documentary topper Charlotte Ducos puts BDE in the picture.

From April 27 to May 1, 23 participants from 13 countries across the Mediterranean and MENA region will gather in Ajaccio, Corsica for a five-day workshop led by Alexandre Cornu and Diana El Jeiroudi. “At a time when unjust and devastating wars continue to affect parts of the Arab world, we believe it is more essential than ever to support documentary projects and voices from the region, and to foster meaningful collaboration and co-production between Western Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean,” organisers write.

The Docs-in-Progress program partners with institutions from around the world to exhibit carefully selected works at final stages of production and which are looking to hit the circuit within the coming weeks or months. Each of the eight showcases features four projects, presented in the form of a live pitch and a 10-minute excerpt of the rough-cut, designed to catch the attention of decision-makers, festival programmers, and sales agents. Cannes Docs runs 14-19 May 2026.

The 16 films competing for this year’s Doc Alliance Awards were announced April 15. Each of the seven European documentary festivals that make up the Doc Alliance network, together with this year’s guest festival GAIFF, the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, has put forward one short and one feature-length documentary from its previous programme. The Doc Alliance Award will be presented on 19 May in Cannes during the Doc Day Lunch at the Marché du Film.

Three feature documentaries and one doc hybrid are selected for the Cannes sidebar section dedicated to independent, ground-breaking cinema. “The films presented are all gestures that bring us together—stories rooted in a poetic reality that is joyful, unexpected, but above all free and unformatted. They thus emerge as powerful acts of resistance—and of hope,” the ACID programmers collectively write.