Nick Cunningham

24th edition to run 10-20 March 2022. TDF is an Oscars® documentary feature qualifying festival running in parallel with Agora Doc Market, a lively hub for film professionals. Festival has four competition sections: Feature Length Int’l Competition, Newcomers Int’l Comp, >>Film Forward Int’l Competition and VR Int’l Competition. The deadline for submissions is November 30 2021.

Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival (AJB DOC) announced that a new industry platform, AJD Industry Days @ AJB DOC, which will be launched during the 2022 festival, and “is intended to become one of the largest and most important funding platforms for documentaries.”

In his AJB DOC Competition film, Swedish docmaker Magnus Gertten tells a gripping story of waiting, hoping and familial devotion…and betrayal. He explains all to Business Doc Europe.

Bosnian sculptor Adis Elias Fejzić is a man rooted both in the past and the present, dedicated to reviving the Bosnian art of stećak (or tombstone) carving to create contemporary memorials dedicated to universal human values. The film’s co-director Dragan Stanimirović chisels responses to questions posed by Business Doc Europe.

Al Jazeera commissioning editor and executive producer Sammy Darbashi talks to Business Doc Europe about The House Prison, a tale of a wall and therefore a tale of separation, for which only three shooting days were authorized by Israeli authorities. The film is selected for the AJB DOC’s competition section.

On the face of it, Wait For Me is about as straightforward as it gets. What could be simpler than filming your parents looking after your grandmother for a weekend? Well, think again. Because grannie, a 96-year-old former 2WW partisan captain, is as sharp as a pin, and the business of caring is one that director Damir Markovina’s mother is finding increasingly stressful. The filmmaker tells more to Business Doc Europe.

Screening in the festival’s new SMART DOC section, Pašić’s film tells the story of a Muslim family that was incarcerated in the Heliodrom and Žepče concentration camps (for males and females respectively) during the Balkans War nearly 30 years ago. The director explains to BDE how such a film is important both as a historical document but also a form of therapy for the individuals who are finally given the opportunity to tell their story.

The fourth Al Jazeera Balkans International Documentary Film Festival (AJB DOC) opened September 10 in Sarajevo with a screening of Catherine Harte’s Faith and Branko. The festival, comprising 21 documentaries across 4 sections, including the new Smart Doc program which presents docs filmed on mobiles, runs to September 14.

Taking place in hybrid format, the 25th edition of Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries (Baltic Sea Docs) brought together filmmakers from the wider Baltic Sea region, Eastern Europe and Caucasus region. 18 film projects participated this year, representing film studios in 17 countries including Latvia, Poland, Armenia, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Georgia, Russia, among others.

In their ground-breaking volumetric VR world-premiering in Venice, Dutch makers Anna Abrahams and Avinash Changa tell the story of four fierce and ambitious women who decide to fight for their fair share of the wealth on offer during Amsterdam’s Golden Age.