Davide Abbatescianni

As Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG) looks back on another record-breaking edition, festival head Artur Liebhart argues that documentary cinema’s challenges remain unchanged — but so do its opportunities. Running May 8–17 across Warsaw and seven other Polish cities before continuing online until June 2, this year’s edition unfolded against a familiar backdrop of industry concern: shrinking financing, cautious platforms and an increasingly competitive documentary landscape. Yet if anxiety was in the air, so too was a determination to keep building international bridges. BDE reports.

n Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough, the eponymous author of Transpotting is followed by director Paul Sng through a period of transition. The film, which screened at Millennium Docs Against Gravity, presents Welsh as an artist looking back at fame, excess, class, music, sport, drugs and mortality, while still searching for new creative directions. It was a process that Wesh found illuminating. “I think documentaries in some ways are probably the most counter-cultural,” Welsh told Business Doc Europe. “Because they’re generally independently produced. And that lends itself to a kind of freedom that a lot of filmmakers in fictional cinema don’t really have.”

During her Cannes Docs’ Doc Day keynote, titled The Edit Is The Film, Japanese-British filmmaker and editor Ema Ryan Yamazaki offered a candid and highly personal reflection on the role of editing in documentary cinema, drawing on her work on the Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated Black Box Diaries (2024) and the more recent American Doctor (2026).

At this year’s Doc Day, Academy Award-winning Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov and Deutsche Kinemathek artistic director Heleen Gerritsen offered highly thoughtful and sensitive reflections on the ethical and artistic dilemmas facing filmmakers working in conflict zones. “We are balancing on this thin line between being truthful and realistic and honest, and trying to be exciting,” said Chernov, adding: “The filmmaker who tries to tell a war story cannot cleanse it...It has to be terrifying.”

The Spanish Docs-in-Progress showcase featured four documentary projects at different stages of development, highlighting the diversity of contemporary Spanish non-fiction filmmaking through stories rooted in identity, environmental collapse, social control and collective healing. Organised with the support of ICEX, ICAA and Zinebi, the presentation took place on May 17 as part of the Marché du Film’s industry programme.

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.