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.

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…

Set within the ancient Hyrcanian forests of northern Iran, the film follows an elderly herding couple who may be among the last practitioners of a traditional form of cattle herding in this region. “What makes the project unique is its intimate, long-term access to the characters over multiple years and seasons, combined with a purely observational approach,” director Yaser Talebi tells BDE. “Rather than constructing conflict externally, the film allows time, landscape, and daily labor to reveal a quiet but profound tension between staying and leaving, continuity and rupture.”

Swiss producer Gaspard Vignon talks to Business Doc Europe about his doc that details attempts in Switzerland to reintegrate wolves into the countryside. “The wolf’s return carries a strong and polarised political debate in a lot of European countries, especially the alpine countries,” he says. “Inhabiting the Night is clearly a political manifesto and has an impact dimension, but not by addressing this debate directly. The question isn’t ‘pro or anti the wolf,’ but ‘how do we coexist, how do we share a common space?’”

Uruguayan Agustín Flores’ highly personal documentary interweaves the story of Jorge Firpo, a legendary horse trainer, with the director’s own journey through the pain of his father’s suicide. “Leaving the track is inevitable — it will happen to all of us,” Flores tells BDE. “The question is: how do we make life worth living before that moment arrives? Because a life without passion is a life without meaning.”

Ireland/UK’s Mike Downey and Istanbul-based Emir Kuelal Haznevi, both executive producers on Cannes competition 2026 entries Parallel Tales (Asghar Farhadi) and All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), have joined forces to form the new boutique film financing outfit Saudade Ink to develop, produce and invest in quality arthouse fiction and documentary cinema from across the world.