Davide Abbatescianni

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.

A new documentary exploring the life and work of largely overlooked African-American photographer Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) was pitched to industry professionals at CPH:DOX Forum. The film, titled Letter to Alvin, is directed by Hilton Als and Göran Hugo Olsson, and produced by Tobias Janson and Melissa Lindgren, with Sweden and the United States attached as producing countries. BDE reports.

Irish filmmaker Roisin Agnew presented her hybrid documentary Blackest Ever Black at CPH:DOX Forum 2026, a project examining the political, environmental and economic implications of Ireland’s rapid expansion of data centres – using satire and fictional framing to interrogate the global power of Big Tech. “Ireland has been at the forefront of this expansion for decades. If you want to understand tech and the threat it presents, you need to understand Ireland and how these companies operate there,” explained Agnew.

A community of Congolese plantation workers turning art into a tool for land restitution and ecological repair took centre stage at the CPH:DOX Roughcut showcase held on 16 March, as filmmakers Céd’art Tamasala and Renzo Martens presented The Dawn of the Post Plantation. “This film is a tool,” DRC artist Tamasala underscored. “A tool to get back our land, our dignity and to bring the sacred back into our community.”

Irish filmmaker Gar O’Rourke (Sanatorium) returned to CPH:DOX this year with The Siege of Paradise, a character-driven documentary exploring the human consequences of over-tourism in Italy’s Cinque Terre. “A few years ago an Italian friend told me about this small place of fewer than 4,000 people receiving more than four million tourists every year,” O’Rourke recalled. “I wanted to understand what that actually felt like.”

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir presented her new hybrid doc project Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me, which concerns teenager Fatimazahra who, before her sad passing, suffered from xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a rare genetic condition that makes exposure to sunlight potentially fatal. Now her younger sister Meriem carries forward Fatimazahra’s dream of travelling to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, where the polar night allows for months without sunlight. “I’m looking for ways to keep her alive,” the filmmaker explained. “Through her voice, through her own images — creating a dialogue between the living and the absent.”