Davide Abbatescianni

More than four decades after murders and arson attacks terrorised northern Italy and Germany, questions remain about the neo-Nazi group Ludwig and the ideology behind its crimes. Simone Manetti’s Ludwig – The Black Angels investigates those unresolved issues through court records, archival material and first-hand testimony. The 82-minute documentary, courtesy of Italy’s B&B Film with Germany’s Beetz Brothers Film Production and Hearst Networks Italy, is now completed and will be presented at Rome’s MIA as part of the Italians Doc It Better programme.

The moka pot may be an icon of Italian domestic life, but its story is not simply about how coffee is made. In Moka, with a Small M, director Matteo Severgnini – grandson of inventor Alfonso Bialetti – revisits the people who turned an aluminium coffee maker into a global design icon, drawing on previously unseen family archives to ask how innovation emerges amid technological change. Produced by TIWI, the 56-minute documentary is in the final stages of post-production and will be presented at Rome’s MIA 2026.

French director Mathilde Damoisel is examining more than a century of Italian emigration in Ciao Italia!, a 90-minute documentary that challenges the familiar narrative of successful integration by looking at the discrimination, labour struggles and changing racial identities experienced by Italian communities abroad. Produced by Paris-based Hauteville Productions in co-production with Arte France, the film is currently in production and will be presented at the Doc Pitching Forum during Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23.

From cycling across Africa to negotiating Siberian rivers in temperatures as low as -60°C, Italian explorer Lorenzo Barone has spent much of his adult life seeking out places where survival depends on his own decisions. But the people waiting for him at home are just as central to Extreme Land Solo, a completed 54-minute documentary by Filippo Lupini that will be presented in the Italians Doc It Better showcase at Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23, 2026.

French filmmaker Sophie Bassaler is developing Salò, Pasolini’s Last Cry, a 90-minute feature documentary revisiting Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), not simply as a landmark of cinematic provocation but as a warning about the mechanisms of power that, she argues, still shape contemporary society. The France–Italy co-production, produced by Philippe Touzery of Wendigo Films alongside Matteo Tortone of Malfé Film, will be presented at the MIA market in Rome, running October 19–23, 2026, as part of its Doc Connect: One-on-One programme.

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.