Business Doc Europe

In her feature documentary, world-premiering in Lisbon, Inês Oliveira profiles the prolific stills photographer Mariana Viegas who worked on the sets of some of Portugal’s most revered filmmakers, such as Šarūnas Bartas, Pedro Costa and Manoel de Oliveira. “These were films that marked me, they are still important films for me,” Oliveira observes to BDE, and describes Viegas’ photos as “somehow like a time machine,” giving viewers new perspectives on the important work of these major auteurs.

“I’ve always been fascinated by - and have often wondered about - the extent to which the places we live, and the cycles of nature that surround us, influence who we are and who we become,” Ribeiro tells Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which have now led her to make Vent du matin (a world premiere in Portuguese competition at Doclisboa), a film that unfolds over a year within the vineyards of Beaujolais.

Doclisboa’s Marina Thomé discusses this year’s offer to international professionals attending Nebulae, the festival’s industry programme that kicks off October 16. “Success, for us, is creating an environment where filmmakers can develop author-driven projects that challenge cinematic form and language, while creating spaces for reflection through roundtables, conversations with festival programmers, training activities, labs and live cinema performances,” she underlines to BDE.

Doclisboa (15-25 October) is one of the first events in a packed autumn season for documentary markets and festivals that also includes Ji.hlava, DOK Leipzig and, a few weeks later, IDFA. Festival director Hélder Beja argues, however, that the Lisbon footprint is very different to those of the other events. “We truly defend and believe in film above all,” Beja tells BDE. “We have gone a little bit away from the term ‘documentary’ these days, even if we have it in the name of our festival. ‘Documentary’ is a word that very rarely appears in everything that we write.”

Fourteen Dutch documentary projects, twelve of which are at advanced stage, will be presented during the second edition of NLWave (September 30 to October 2), an initiative of the Netherlands Film Fund and presented in co-operation with SEE NL. The 2026 showcase comprises a who’s who of top Dutch creative and business talent, and presents a wealth of fascinating stories that span the globe. Simone van den Broek, Head of Documentary and Fiction at the Netherlands Film Fund, guides Business Doc Europe through this year’s selection.

World-premiering in Utrecht, Joeri Pruys’s Final Cut looks at how the provocative TV show Body Art, made by Pruys’s father in the 1970s and starring the then little-known Serbian artist Marina Abramović, turned into one of the most notorious cases in the history of Dutch censorship. “The rules around who is actually the owner of this material are very vague,” Pruys tells BDE. “That is why in the film I am also saying it is my heritage, so I should be able to do with it whatever I want, because my father created this. It’s Marina’s work as well, so she should be free to use it.”

Iconic Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti is a woman on a mission. Having completed her historic tenure as Director-General of CERN, during which time The Higgs Boson particle was discovered, she is now facing her most complex battle yet in advocating for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), the multi-billion-dollar successor to the Large Hadron Collider, and which represents “humanity’s next attempt to answer some of the universe's greatest remaining mysteries.”

More than four decades after murders and arson attacks terrorised northern Italy and Germany, questions remain about the neo-Nazi group Ludwig and the ideology behind its crimes. Simone Manetti’s Ludwig – The Black Angels investigates those unresolved issues through court records, archival material and first-hand testimony. The 82-minute documentary, courtesy of Italy’s B&B Film with Germany’s Beetz Brothers Film Production and Hearst Networks Italy, is now completed and will be presented at Rome’s MIA as part of the Italians Doc It Better programme.

The moka pot may be an icon of Italian domestic life, but its story is not simply about how coffee is made. In Moka, with a Small M, director Matteo Severgnini – grandson of inventor Alfonso Bialetti – revisits the people who turned an aluminium coffee maker into a global design icon, drawing on previously unseen family archives to ask how innovation emerges amid technological change. Produced by TIWI, the 56-minute documentary is in the final stages of post-production and will be presented at Rome’s MIA 2026.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Imperium was handed the Best Film Award in Official Competition while Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land picked up the Grierson Award in Documentary Competition, with Theo Rollason received a Special Mention for Queer Edward II. Of Imperium the London FF jury noted how they were “immensely proud to honour such a powerful and singular piece of work.”

French director Mathilde Damoisel is examining more than a century of Italian emigration in Ciao Italia!, a 90-minute documentary that challenges the familiar narrative of successful integration by looking at the discrimination, labour struggles and changing racial identities experienced by Italian communities abroad. Produced by Paris-based Hauteville Productions in co-production with Arte France, the film is currently in production and will be presented at the Doc Pitching Forum during Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23.

From cycling across Africa to negotiating Siberian rivers in temperatures as low as -60°C, Italian explorer Lorenzo Barone has spent much of his adult life seeking out places where survival depends on his own decisions. But the people waiting for him at home are just as central to Extreme Land Solo, a completed 54-minute documentary by Filippo Lupini that will be presented in the Italians Doc It Better showcase at Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23, 2026.