Business Doc Europe

The 48th edition of the Paris-based festival and market kicks off March 21. "It is interesting how ParisDOC now covers the full spectrum of documentary filmmaking, from early writing stages to near-completion, and through to questions of circulation and heritage,” enthuses Anaïs Desrieux of the festival’s professional component. “This creates a coherent ecosystem and reinforces our role in supporting the valorisation of documentary cinema in all its forms.”

In Oscar-nominated Sara Dosa’s new feature doc, produced by National Geographic, renowned Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his film archives into a time capsule to hold onto the memory both of his country’s diminishing glaciers and his beloved grandparents. “I think for me, both as a person and a filmmaker, I'm endlessly inspired by the power of nature, and how humans can co-create story and meaning with nature,” Dosa tells Business Doc Europe.

Movies That Matter, the Hague-based festival for works exploring human rights and social issues, opens March 20 with American Doctor by Poh Si Teng, which world-premiered at Sundance. MTM has its share of world premieres, but Artistic Director Margje de Koning is less worried about having films first than other festivals. “For Movies That Matter, it’s nice to have premieres but it’s not our main requirement. Our philosophy is very much about the impact of the film.”

When thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters were washed up on beaches in the North East of England, director Jeanie Finlay quickly realised she had stumbled on an extraordinary but very grim story about the wanton destruction of marine life and the knock-on effect on fishing communities. Her new documentary, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, investigates the event. What’s more, it will be released by Glimmerama, the recently announced distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the production company owned by Finlay, who explains more to BDE.

In Spanish director María Molina Peiró’s lyrical and impressionistic Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), selected for CPH:DOX NEXT:WAVE, a remote robot searches a distant planet...

Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche sat down with BDE to discuss her audacious directorial debut In-I In Motion, which records how, in the radical theatrical piece In-I (2007), she set out to dismantle the boundaries between movement and acting, together with acclaimed British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan. At the same time the pair explored the complexities of love and lust, devotion and jealousy, separation and reconciliation.

A community of Congolese plantation workers turning art into a tool for land restitution and ecological repair took centre stage at the CPH:DOX Roughcut showcase held on 16 March, as filmmakers Céd’art Tamasala and Renzo Martens presented The Dawn of the Post Plantation. “This film is a tool,” DRC artist Tamasala underscored. “A tool to get back our land, our dignity and to bring the sacred back into our community.”

The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY Awards 2026 were announced March 19, with the Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award, valued at €30,000, going to Don’t Let The Sun Go Up On Me by director Asmae El Moudir and producer Emma Lepers. The Sandbox Films Science Pitch Prize 2026, worth $25,000, went to Matrescence by Kathryn Ferguson. produced by Eleanor Emptage, Rosie Crerar. All awards…

Irish filmmaker Gar O’Rourke (Sanatorium) returned to CPH:DOX this year with The Siege of Paradise, a character-driven documentary exploring the human consequences of over-tourism in Italy’s Cinque Terre. “A few years ago an Italian friend told me about this small place of fewer than 4,000 people receiving more than four million tourists every year,” O’Rourke recalled. “I wanted to understand what that actually felt like.”

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir presented her new hybrid doc project Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me, which concerns teenager Fatimazahra who, before her sad passing, suffered from xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a rare genetic condition that makes exposure to sunlight potentially fatal. Now her younger sister Meriem carries forward Fatimazahra’s dream of travelling to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, where the polar night allows for months without sunlight. “I’m looking for ways to keep her alive,” the filmmaker explained. “Through her voice, through her own images — creating a dialogue between the living and the absent.”

Estonian filmmaker Maris Salumets presented her investigative documentary War on Women during this year's CPH:DOX Rough Cut presentation, held on 16 March. Salumets offered industry professionals an early look at a project that seeks to map the global networks driving anti-gender politics across Europe. “This is a film about my own journey investigating the anti-gender movement in Europe and its close ties to US and Russian money and influence,” she told the Copenhagen audience.

DocsBarcelona will open its 29th edition on May 7 with the Iranian film A Fox Under a Pink Moon, in which sixteen-year-old artist Soraya Akhlaghi documents her attempts to escape Iran, where she lives with her abusive husband, and reunite with her mother in Austria. The festival, which runs From May 7 to 17, 2026, also gives a glimpse of first selections in its Official and Visions Competition sections.