Business Doc Europe

In Hungry, world-premiering February 2 in IFFR’s Harbour section, Austrian director Susanne Brandstaetter offers a sobering account of how, in the not-so-distant future, humankind has allowed itself to become extinct. With no humans left on Earth to explain exactly why this, it is left to an alien visitor to the planet to determine the food-related sequence of events, the “cause and effect” that led to our demise as a species. The filmmaker serves up the conclusions for Business Doc Europe.

A feast for the eyes and ears, the hybrid Krakatoa, presented both theatrically within IFFR’s Harbour section and as an installation within Art Directions, recreates the volcanic explosion of 1883 which resulted in the loudest sound ever heard. It is a film with contemporary resonance, within an ecological sense. “It’s a goal to rethink our position with the planet… we have to make a kind of sacrifice to nature in order to appease it, in order for it to become stable again, and establish an equilibrium.”

Reading through her teenage diaries reminded director Angelica Ruffier of a romantic obsession she once developed for her history teacher. That memory forms the basis of her new feature doc, selected for IFFR Tiger Competition. “The really difficult part was to read them now…” she tells BDE of a sense of shame she felt when she first looked back over the old notebooks. However, she soon realised that what she had written was, in fact, frank and accurate, a record of “pure” experience.

The Polish feature documentary Closure tells the most desperate of personal stories, that of a dad searching for his lost son. “This film became one of the most challenging I’ve made on every level, because it required holding two impulses at once,” says director Michał Marczak. “On the one hand, I wanted to keep the crew minimal and intimate. On the other hand, I wanted the film to carry an epic scope, to convey emotion through images and atmosphere, through showing rather than telling.”

In his new doc series, the first part of which world-premieres in Sundance Episodic, Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard chronicles the decade-long legal battle between the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev over the enormous mark-ups that Bouvier applied to the sales. “I trust neither of them and never trusted them. They play a billion-dollar game that complicates things for everyone,” Dalsgaard tells BDE.

For 10 years, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes followed Isra’a and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, as they were forced to navigate war, exile and emotional anguish. As we see in the film, selected for Sundance World Documentary Competition, characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” co-director MacInnes tells Business Doc Europe.

The film, directed by Kristina Mikhailova, will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in the Forum Special section. River Dreams marks a historic milestone as the first documentary from Kazakhstan ever selected for Berlin. “My film is a love-hate letter to Kazakhstan, told through a female gaze, already an act of resistance where I come from,” says director Mikhailova. (See exclusive first look at the film’s official poster.)

CPH:DOX announced February 5 the line-up of artworks and experiences for its 2026 INTER:ACTIVE exhibition, running March 11-22 and centred on the theme of HYPERVIGILANCE’ “The works in this year’s INTER:ACTIVE exhibition expose the collective anxiety of a society on high alert, where we struggle to retain agency over our image, body, and voice,” comments CPH:LAB’s Head of Studies, Mark Atkin.

Visions du Réel announced February 5 that U.S. filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras will be the Special Guest at the opening of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry, the Festival's programme dedicated to industry professionals. Laura Poitras is the author of a post-9/11 trilogy, which concluded with the Oscar-winning film CITIZENFOUR. Poitras’ latest film, Cover-Up, which world-premiered at Venice 2025, paints a portrait of American journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke a series of major stories, from the Watergate scandal to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War.

The feature doc concerns Rio’s Projeto ViDançar initiative that offers underprivileged children, living in the notoriously violent Complexo do Alemão favela, the opportunity to express themselves through ballet. The idea came to producer Mike Downey (also outgoing Chair of the European Film Academy) back in 2013 when in Rio to shoot a film. Friend Stephen Daldry was there too, in part to present a screening of his Billy Elliot. “I think, there and then, the seeds of this documentary were sown,” says Downey, who also reflects to BDE on his 25 years at EFA.

Running March 8 to 10, the Geneva-based industry programme will present a packed schedule of keynotes, screenings, case studies and analyses of best practices from around the world. Core to proceedings is the pitch of 12 international film projects developed during the Impact Lab training programme, and a 4 further impact projects in Swiss Focus. The event offers filmmakers the opportunity to connect with impact producers, philanthropists and key human rights organisations based in Geneva and beyond.

French sales company Andana Films has boarded Tawfik Sabouni’s The Other Side of the Sun which receives its world premiere in Berlin Panorama 2026, in which the director returns to post-Assad Syria to meet four fellow former detainees of the notorious former Saidnaya prison. “The film reveals the horror of a system and its executioners, while also bringing out a profound human beauty born from the protagonists’ listening and solidarity,” says Stephan Riguet, Andana Films MD.