Business Doc Europe

In Edgar Hagen’s new film, The Roots Of Madness (screening in The National Competition at Visions Du Réel), the filmmaker accompanies the near-legendary German war reporter Ulrich Tilgner on a journey back to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. “The special thing about him is that he always tried to understand the people, not only the politics,” Hagen observes of the journalist’s humanistic, ground-level approach to his work.

In his essay-style documentary, director G. Anthony Svatek uses the story of Alexander von Humboldt, once the world’s most famous scientist, as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues. “I thought the strongest way to do that is in the form of a love letter from me to him, showing him what is left of his vision of an interconnected world and how technology has totally changed this idea of a holistic ecology that he proposed.”

Ghost Town (screening in official selection in Vision Du Réel) joins the growing ranks of documentaries and docudramas set in taxis. The setting is Kamaishi, a small Japanese town where the locals haven’t been able to exorcise memories of the devastating 2011 tsunami. As we discover, the catastrophe still dominates the conversations and even the dreams of the local people. Director Katharine Round discusses her new work with BDE.

A Fire There (sold by Filmotor) sees Montreal-based filmmaker Marlene Edoyan venturing to the remote village of Gandzani, a predominantly Armenian enclave within southern Georgia. Her three main characters are young men on the cusp of adulthood and facing familiar decisions about their future. “It was like finding a part of my past almost,” Edoyan says. “I came across a group of people [and] recognised something very familiar, maybe a fragment of my story of displacement.”

It is well known that in space, nobody can hear you scream, but in the case of the astronauts on the 1973 NASA Skylab mission, nobody could hear their demands for better working conditions either. Everything the crew did was measured by their controllers in Houston who wanted as much data as possible about how humans coped in space - and didn’t care a jot for their well-being. In his new feature doc, nominated by Visions du Réel for the Doc Alliance Prize, UK doccer Graeme Arnfield investigates the incident further. He reports in to BDE.

Shot in the Persian Gulf, the feature doc Heat, directed by Jacqueline Zünd, deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. “It's like a magnifying glass amplifying all these differences, especially the economic and social disparities,” Zünd tells Business Doc Europe. “Because there is a certain [very high] temperature, rich people do not leave their houses anymore… Meanwhile, the poor people are dying out there, or maybe having heatstroke, while delivering food at noon when they call for lunch. It's really crazy.”

US indie cinema’s most fastidious (and ostensibly fiction) director Kelly Reichardt talked at length about her love of small things and her “granular” approach to filmmaking during her VdR Masterclass, presented April 21. “While we were having lunch, Emilie [Bujès, VdR Artistic Director) was trying to convince me that there is not a difference [between documentary and fiction]. As I said, I don’t know how documentaries are made. It is such a different process. I love watching them…[but] everything I do, it’s all made up!”

MDAG Industry will take place from 7 to 11 May in Warsaw’s State Ethnographic Museum. ”From working with personal and family archives, through giving voice to communities living in the shadow of political change, to practical accessibility tools – this year, the Industry programme brings together filmmakers, producers and institutions who treat inclusivity not as an add-on, but as a foundation of contemporary documentary cinema,” organisers write. ”The guiding theme of this year’s programme is the voices that have been kept on the margins for far too long.”

With a program structured around five thematic threads of Art, Change, Female Lens, Nature and Together, this year’s edition presents a total of 46 international documentary feature films and 12 short films. Non-fiction book readings, live podcasts, and a virtual reality exhibition will offer alternative entry points into documentary storytelling. Running May 27 to June 7, Doxumentale “transforms Potsdamer Platz into a vibrant meeting space for film, literature, podcasts, and immersive media."

DOK.fest Munich has unveiled the programme for its 41st edition. 106 films from 49 countries will be screened, 23 of which will have their world premiere, and a further 59 films will have their international or German premiere. Films will compete for three main prizes, the VIKTORIAs for International and German Competitions, and for Cinema of Urgency. This year, the programme team selected from 1,440 submissions – a new record for the festival. DOK.fest Munich runs this year May 6 to 18.

Six new Swiss doc projects, ripe for selection at festivals during 2026, will be presented April 22 in Nyon to industry professionals from the international sales, distribution and finance sectors, as well as festival programmers from across the globe. Thirteen more will be presented within the Prix RTS and newly established Migros Culture Percentage Story Lab. What’s more, there’s a hatful of Swiss films across the festival’s competition and non-competitive sections. Swiss Films documentary topper Charlotte Ducos puts BDE in the picture.

From April 27 to May 1, 23 participants from 13 countries across the Mediterranean and MENA region will gather in Ajaccio, Corsica for a five-day workshop led by Alexandre Cornu and Diana El Jeiroudi. “At a time when unjust and devastating wars continue to affect parts of the Arab world, we believe it is more essential than ever to support documentary projects and voices from the region, and to foster meaningful collaboration and co-production between Western Asia, Europe and the Mediterranean,” organisers write.