Business Doc Europe

The short documentary The Devil Is Busy comprises a day in the life of Tracii, the head of security at a women's healthcare clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, who works tirelessly to protect the women who are forced to fight through protesters to receive their abortion care. “We wanted to take people through what it means to be in the positions of the staff, the women who are working in this clinic day in and day out, because they are really on the front line of what has turned into a battle,” co-director Gandbhir states. “With many of the protesters outside, it’s like a holy war.”

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.

Movies that Matter will “move forward with a single-director structure” as of 16 April 2026, the festival says in an online post. Margje de Koning will take on the role of Managing Director-Trustee. Laurens Korteweg, who has served as Business Director-Trustee since September 2023, will leave the organisation following a carefully planned transition period. The decision has been taken in response to ongoing financial pressure and is aimed at safeguarding the organisation’s future, the festival writes.

Oscar-nominated actress Fernanda Torres talks to Petra Costa, herself nominated for a feature Doc Academy Award in 2020 for The Edge of Democracy, about the latter’s latest work, Apocalypse in the Tropics, nominated in the Bafta Best Documentary category 2026. The film examines the influence of evangelical Christianity on far-right politics in Brazil, especially during Jair Bolsonaro’s term of office (2019-23). In 2025 Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison after he was found guilty of orchestrating a coup d'état to overturn the 2022 election results.

In her feature doc Angelica Ruffier recalls a teenage crush she had on a particular teacher, while at the same time dealing with the recent death of her father. “The director, through an amazing craft of acting and directing, gives us a perceptive on womanhood too rarely portrayed in cinema…[she is] a very unique voice who made us travel through generations charged with loneliness with absolute honesty and radical tenderness.”

After nearly fifty years under wraps, the film, which was conceived and shot by the legendary William Greaves and directed by his son David Greaves, spotlights footage from a 1972 gathering of luminaries of the Harlem renaissance. Last month, NEON received 18 Oscar nominations for the 98th Academy Awards, the second highest amount for any motion picture studio.

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.