Nick Cunningham

110 films from 39 films selected from 2648 film submissions. 43 world and 4 international premieres across the FID Marseille (19-25 July) competitions. Opening film is Mano a Mano (with lyrical text by Eric Cantona). “Although the festival’s length and scope were reduced last year, for this 32nd edition, we are back at almost full sail!” says festival chief Jean-Pierre Rehm.

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas will world premiere in Cannes Classics section in 2021. In the film, director Cousins joins Thomas on an intimate road trip from London to the Cannes Film Festival – an annual pilgrimage that Thomas has taken for the last 40 years.

IDF and DAE call for “ongoing support for pitching events and markets in these smaller countries…to showcase and celebrate European storytelling in all its diversity, while also allowing the same support and ‘home court advantage’ to be accessible to CEE film professionals.” Bring decision-making structure to the region, the report further advises.

Maria Speth’s Mr Bachmann and His Class wins 2021 inaugural Berlinale Competition Audience Award while The Panorama Audience Award goes to The Last Forest (Brazil) by Luiz Bolognesi. For the Competition Audience Award at total of 8,498 ballots were counted while 5,658 ballots were counted to determine the winner of the Panorama Award.

After yesterday’s unveiling of Polish projects at Sunny Side’s Producers Meet Producers, today sees a presentation of Poland’s offer to the international doc community as a potential co-production partner. Polish Docs' Barbara Orlicz‐Szczypuła and Katarzyna Wilk explain more to Business Doc Europe.

The new market service will “serve as a bespoke platform for fostering international co-production, providing a necessary space for sustaining this collaborative model of realizing documentary projects,” say IDFA organisers.

Julia Fuhr Mann’s British Pathé Archive Award-winning project sets out to explore the utopian potential within the Olympic discipline of running, and sketches a world of sport beyond rigid gender images. Producer Melissa Byrne explains more to BDE.

The Ultimate Joker is Polish, former Communist era spin-meister Jerzy Urban who, according to director Krzysztof Dzięciołowski and producer Agata Jujeczka, “gave us political spin, fake news and polarising politics long before Donald Trump, Andrzej Duda and Jair Bolsonaro were an itch in their daddies’ pants.”

When Armenian filmmaker Inna Sahakyan discovered the story of the extraordinary Aurora Mardiganian, a star of Hollywood’s silent era, when going through the Zoryan Institute archives, she finally found a way to tell her story of the Armenian genocide.

Jayson McNamara’s new doc tells the story of Nora Cortiñas, Argentina’s “godmother of democracy,” who was transformed from conservative “housewife” into trailblazing activist after the kidnap and disappearance of her son Gustavo in 1977, presumed murdered by the dictatorship. Nora’s inspirational activism has continued undiminished, McNamara tells BDE.