Davide Abbatescianni

Five Nordic documentaries at advanced stages of production were pitched May 16 to international decision-makers as part of  Cannes Docs’  Docs-in-Progress programme, with teams from Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Sweden seeking festivals, sales agents, distributors, gap financing and impact partners. The session was hosted by Elisabeth Aalmo of the Norwegian Film Institute. Business Doc Europe reports.

At MDAG 2026, US filmmaker Alan Berliner delivered a generous masterclass titled Think Like a Filmmaker, guiding the audience through more than four decades of work built around memory, family, identity, insomnia, archive and the “fragility of the human condition.” Opening the session, Berliner gently questioned the very idea of a masterclass. “I have a little trouble with this word 'master,'” he said. “I’ve been making films for more than 40 years and really what that means is that I’ve made more mistakes than you.”

“This movie, for me, is not just a project. It has been part of my life,” said Soraya Akhalaghi at the beginning of a masterclass held at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Warsaw, where she appeared alongside Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei to discuss the making of A Fox Under a Pink Moon. The session, held on May 9 and titled “Remote Intimacy: Building Connection in a Distant Documentary,” focused on a seven-year creative process shaped by “distance, trust, danger and improvisation.”

Belarusian filmmaker Andrei Kutsila is currently in post-production on Letters (WT), a 90-minute documentary that portrays contemporary Belarus through the correspondences of people affected by political repression, imprisonment, exile and state violence. Produced by Mirosław Dembiński for Poland’s DocEdu Foundation, the film is a Poland-Germany-Lithuania co-production with inselfilm produktion and Moonmakers. BDE reports.

Polish filmmaker Łukasz Kowalski is developing Children of the Black Garden, a new feature documentary rooted in the toxic legacy of Silesia’s industrial past, and the hidden story of a doctor who exposed mass lead poisoning among children in the 1970s. Produced by Anna Mazerant and Kowalski himself through 4.30 Studio, the project is among the titles being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8.

Polish filmmaker Maciej Bochniak is developing The Lawyer, a new feature documentary following the extraordinary case of Brian Mwenda, a Kenyan man who reportedly passed himself off as a lawyer, built a reputation in Nairobi’s legal circles and became a national controversy after his real credentials were called into question. “I was drawn to Brian’s story because, in a certain way, I had lived it myself — due to my own diagnosed impostor syndrome,” says Bochniak.

Polish helmers Sylwia Witowska and Piotr Wacowski are in mid-production on After Roll Call. Legio Patria Nostra, a feature documentary set inside a French Foreign Legion veterans’ home in Puyloubier, in the south of France. “This is not a film about war,” the filmmakers underline. “It is about what happens to a person when the system that shaped them no longer exists.”

In No Mother’s Land, pitching May 8 in Warsaw, director Wiktoria Davis Szymańska recounts her gripping decade-long ordeal to protect her daughter, all the time trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare. For Szymańska, the pitch also marks a decisive step in bringing to the screen a story she began filming long before it could be safely told. BDE reports.

At Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG, May 8-17), pitching does not only mean introducing projects in development. With Pole Position, the Warsaw-based festival has created a format designed for completed Polish documentaries already selected for its programme, giving producers the opportunity to present the completed works to international festival programmers, sales agents, distributors and broadcasters. BDE reports.

Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc presented his new investigative documentary project, titled Director’s Cut, at the CPH:DOX Forum 2026, offering a behind-the-scenes look at humanitarian aid operations in times of war, and the murky intersection between crisis response, political influence and media narratives. “Slowly, I understood that goodwill here is laundered into power, control and profit,” he says.