INTERVIEWS
MDAG Polish Comp: Traces by Alisa Kovalenko, Marysia Nikitiuk
Traces, which won the Doc Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026 and is now selected for Polish Comp at MDAG, addresses head-on the collective trauma suffered by survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), as perpetrated by the Russian military on Ukrainian women and men since 2014. "You see these women, you see their faces. They're not covered. They're not blurred. They're ready to talk. They're ready to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of truth,” co-director Kovalenko tells BDE.
MDAG Polish Comp: Freak Show by Lukasz Ronduda and Filip Pawlak
In Freak Show, Lukasz Ronduda and Filip Pawlak work with a group of disabled performers as they prepare for a show at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. The idea was to explore different ways in which they could represent the disabled body on stage while reflecting on the pain and contradictions of disabled life. It is a work that forces audiences to confront their preconceptions and prejudices about disabled bodies. Pawlak discusses the film with BDE.
DOK.fest Munich Int’l Comp: Helene Weigel – Instructions for a Revolution...
In her feature doc world-premiering in International Competition at DOK.fest Munich, Maria Wischnewski profiles Helene Weigel, the great German actress, theatre manager and matriarch, and partner of Bertolt Brecht. “It is a strikingly modern story which, despite all its ambivalence, is far ahead of today’s feminist debates. In a time when we desperately need role models, there is still much to learn from her,” Wischnewski tells BDE.
DOK.fest Munich German Comp: The Weight of the World by Florian...
Early on, director Florian Heinzen-Ziob thought he would be traveling around the globe, meeting scientists at important institutions in different continents, in making his documentary about the climate crisis. But then he decided it would be a little perverse to roam so far so far afield when his subject was climate change. It made more sense, he eventually decided, to stay closer to home. “In Germany, it was much more easy because I could just do everything by train,” he tells BDE.
MDAG 2026: Anna Szczypińska and Wojciech Diduszko on Pole Position
At Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG, May 8-17), pitching does not only mean introducing projects in development. With Pole Position, the Warsaw-based festival has created a format designed for completed Polish documentaries already selected for its programme, giving producers the opportunity to present the completed works to international festival programmers, sales agents, distributors and broadcasters. BDE reports.
DocsBarcelona interview: Co-Artistic Directors Maria Colomer & Èric Motjer (also Head...
“We don’t separate cinematic quality from impact,” DocsBarcelona’s Èric Motjer tells BDE before doors open on the festival’s 29th edition. “We value both. We look for films that connect with the world we live in and that have cinematic value. I would say that giving value to the collective cinematic experience is central to how we think about the programme.” The festival runs May 7 to 17. Motjer is joined in interview by co-Artistic Director Maria Colomer.
NEWS
MDAG 2026 Progress Pitch: Letters (WT) by Andrei Kutsila
Belarusian filmmaker Andrei Kutsila is currently in post-production on Letters (WT), a 90-minute documentary that portrays contemporary Belarus through the correspondences of people affected by political repression, imprisonment, exile and state violence. Produced by Mirosław Dembiński for Poland’s DocEdu Foundation, the film is a Poland-Germany-Lithuania co-production with inselfilm produktion and Moonmakers. BDE reports.
MDAG 2026: Fiume o morte! wins first FIPRESCI Documentary...
During the May 7 Opening Ceremony of the 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the feature documentary Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović was awarded the inaugural FIPRESCI Documentary Grand Prix, following a vote by members of the International Federation of Film Critics from around the world. The film has already received the European Film Award for Best European Documentary and was recognized at the Rotterdam festival, where it won both the Tiger Award in the Main Competition and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.
MDAG 2026 Progress pitch: Children of the Black Garden...
Polish filmmaker Łukasz Kowalski is developing Children of the Black Garden, a new feature documentary rooted in the toxic legacy of Silesia’s industrial past, and the hidden story of a doctor who exposed mass lead poisoning among children in the 1970s. Produced by Anna Mazerant and Kowalski himself through 4.30 Studio, the project is among the titles being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8.
MDAG 2026 Progress Pitch: Maciej Bochniak’s The Lawyer
Polish filmmaker Maciej Bochniak is developing The Lawyer, a new feature documentary following the extraordinary case of Brian Mwenda, a Kenyan man who reportedly passed himself off as a lawyer, built a reputation in Nairobi’s legal circles and became a national controversy after his real credentials were called into question. “I was drawn to Brian’s story because, in a certain way, I had lived it myself — due to my own diagnosed impostor syndrome,” says Bochniak.
MDAG 2026 Progress Pitch: After Roll Call. Legio Patria...
Polish helmers Sylwia Witowska and Piotr Wacowski are in mid-production on After Roll Call. Legio Patria Nostra, a feature documentary set inside a French Foreign Legion veterans’ home in Puyloubier, in the south of France. “This is not a film about war,” the filmmakers underline. “It is about what happens to a person when the system that shaped them no longer exists.”
MDAG 2026 Progress Pitch: No Mother’s Land by Wiktoria...
In No Mother’s Land, pitching May 8 in Warsaw, director Wiktoria Davis Szymańska recounts her gripping decade-long ordeal to protect her daughter, all the time trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare. For Szymańska, the pitch also marks a decisive step in bringing to the screen a story she began filming long before it could be safely told. BDE reports.
REVIEWS
DocsBarcelona opening film review: A Fox Under A Pink Moon
Frustrated teenager, talented artist, battered wife. Mehrdad Oskouei’s remotely directed Afghan niece Soraya is all these things, while she tenaciously tries to enter the EU from Iran and Turkey, hoping to reunite with her mother in Austria. In this nuanced and intimate documentary we follow Soraya as she films herself (hence her co-director credit) during her desperate odyssey. Visually, the whole experience is enriched by beautiful, painterly animations which are clearly fantastical, but convincingly integrated into the documentary reality.
VdR National Comp review: Alma by Rafael Palacio Illingworth
How can you overcome the desperate fear of losing your loved ones? Filmmaker Rafael Palacio Illingworth tries to find a way which, while raising serious questions about ethics and morality, at the same time immerses the viewer in an enchanting experience where the boundaries between fiction and reality completely dissolve.
VdR Burning Lights Comp review: Baby Jackfruit Baby Guava by Nông Nhật Quang
Nông Nhật Quang’s debut feature brings us into his family’s turbulent dealings both with his queerness and his sister’s mental health issues. The film embraces the free-flowing and lively vitality of social media aesthetics – but also, unfortunately, some of its questionable ethics. The film won the Special Jury Award of the Société des Hôteliers de la Côte.
Visions du Réel National Comp: What Comes From Sitting in Silence? by Sophie Schrago
This truly eye-opening film observes the proceedings in India’s first women-led Islamic court, highlighting the (still) astonishingly unequal status of women in India, but also the powerful and unstoppable way in which women are striving to secure justice. The film dismantles clichés about Muslim women as defenceless victims and Islam as a misogynistic religion. For these women are, in fact, taking religious law into their own hands as a powerful weapon against male dominance.
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