Nick Cunningham

This year marks the 10th anniversary of dok.incubator, a decade in which the film workshop worked with 159 documentaries and led many of them to awards at the world's top festivals. The workshop is now accepting applications for the 2022 edition.

Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee won in the European Documentary and Animated Feature categories while Olga Lucovnicova’s My Uncle Tudor was lauded in the European Short Film category. Flee additionally received the European University Film Award 2021, an honour conferred jointly by EFA and Filmfest Hamburg. The 34th European Film Awards were handed out during the hybrid ceremony December 11 in Berlin.

Ten docs selected for World Cinema Doc Competition. Highlights include Calendar Girls (Sweden), The Mission (Finland), Midwives (Myanmar), Danish Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made Of Splinters and the Irish/UK Nothing Compares, about the early career of Irish songster Sinead O’Connor. Nine US Doc Competition selections, plus details of documentary selections across all sections.

The European Film Awards may be presented virtually this weekend, but European Film Academy Chair Mike Downey goes face to face with BDE on the subject of docs and doccers, the robustness of the sector, the increasingly high value of creative output and its soaring appeal to ever-widening audiences, as well as EFA’s continuing support and advocacy activities via the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR).

Back in October, during DOK Leipzig, Sasha Kulak’s online pitch for her feature doc A Hawk as Big as a Horse generated a long and spontaneous round of applause, despite being made from a moving car on the way to Tbilisi. BDE quizzes Kulak again on her audacious tale of the Russian bi-gender Lydia who wants to recreate the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe in her home near the woods on the outskirts of Moscow.

Agora Docs, the industry arm of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival taking place March 11-19 2022, has invited documentary filmmakers to submit films for the Agora Doc Market (deadline, Feb 28), as well as projects for the Docs in Progress and the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum sections (deadline for both, January 14).

Diana Tabakov talks to BDE about the online portal that has, for the past 16 years, delivered festival docs to living rooms around the world. DAFilms is currently presenting the ‘No Short Cuts’ Thomas Imbach retrospective, and will host on December 7 an online live-stream interview between Imbach and Argentinian critic/curator Roger Koza.

Paul Sng and Celeste Bell’s Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché wins British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) in both the Best Documentary and Raindance Discovery Award categories, while Danish Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee wins in the Best International Independent Film.

Leo Matchett and Michael Musante, co-founders (with American Zoetrope) of the LA-based non-profit Decentralized Pictures (DCP), explained during IDFA 2021 the rationale behind their ‘democratic’ film fund whose blockchain support of projects will be based on consensus approval among an online community of creatives, film fans, and industry professionals alike.

Jason is the third and final part of Maasja Ooms’ trilogy about the failing Dutch youth welfare services, in which the eponymous hero (and there really is something genuinely heroic about Jason) seeks to overcome systemic inadequacies, in the process transforming into an articulate advocate for reform. The documentary won Best Dutch Film at IDFA last week.