Davide Abbatescianni

Estonian filmmaker Maris Salumets presented her investigative documentary War on Women during this year's CPH:DOX Rough Cut presentation, held on 16 March. Salumets offered industry professionals an early look at a project that seeks to map the global networks driving anti-gender politics across Europe. “This is a film about my own journey investigating the anti-gender movement in Europe and its close ties to US and Russian money and influence,” she told the Copenhagen audience.

As British-Romanian Rachel Taparjan follows Mihaela on her return to Romania in search of her birth mother, she finds herself drawn into the unresolved shadows of her own past. For her feature doc Something Familiar, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, the act of shaping the narrative allowed Taparjan to reclaim agency over events that once felt overwhelming. “It gave me a sense of control, a sense of authorship, and ultimately a sense of empowerment,” she tells BDE. “And it gave me beauty and poetry even in very dark chapters of my life.”

Premiering in the main competition at CPH:DOX 2026, Little Sinner is a profoundly intimate documentary built from more than two decades of personal recordings. Helmed by Daro Hansen and Thomas Papapetros, the film traces Hansen’s journey from Damascus to Denmark while confronting the emotional aftermath of forced marriage, displacement and generational trauma. “The stories within it are incredibly important,” Hansen tells BDE. “So we wanted to balance things carefully. The film is only 90 minutes—how many stories can you tell in that time?”

In her feature doc In Defense of Self, Norwegian filmmaker Linn Helene Løken explores the fatal shooting of a man in urgent need of psychiatric help. The film reconstructs the final years of writer Morten Michelsen through more than 35 hours of personal audio recordings, alongside police reconstructions of the incident. World-premiering at CPH:DOX 2026, the 87-minute film examines the fragile intersection between mental healthcare systems and law enforcement, while raising broader questions about responsibility, narrative control and institutional transparency. Director Løken talks to BDE.

Brian Logvinsky's creative feature project, exploring how young Ukrainians navigate war through music, nightlife and community, was presented to professionals at Agora Docs, where it won the 2|35 Post-Production Company Award. Immortal Flowers is currently in post-production and seeking partners for its final stages. “My hope is that audiences first connect with the characters and their energy, and through that begin to understand the reality they’re living in," says director Logvinsky.

An elementary school in northern Italy where all the pupils are children of migrants lies at the heart of The Last Class, a new creative documentary by Italian filmmaker Michele Fornasero (SmoKings) currently in late production. The project, pitched at this year’s Thessaloniki Pitching Forum, is produced by Epica Film and Indyca and is seeking co-production partners, financiers, broadcasters and sales agents as it moves towards completion. BDE reports.

Set to world-premiere in the International Competition of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, Soap Fever explores how the American daytime series The Bold and the Beautiful became an unlikely cultural lifeline in Finland during the severe economic downturn of the early 1990s. “It was this total collision of a miserable societal atmosphere and these glamorous American stars who suddenly appeared in the middle of it,” director Inka Achté explains the unexpected appeal of the US soap.

Elisabeth Rasmussen’s rigorous sophomore documentary follows micrometeorite enthusiast and former jazz musician Jon Larsen who claims to have located real stardust here on Earth, despite extreme scepticism from the scientific establishment. “I want the film to reach people who might be inspired or comforted,” Rasmussen explains her intentions to BDE. “It’s about feeling connected – to each other and to the stars.”

Premiering in the Newcomers Competition of this year’s Thessaloniki Docfest, Tirrenica explores the social landscape surrounding one of Italy’s most emblematic infrastructure projects: the Salerno–Reggio Calabria highway. Moving between present-day observational footage and archival material, the film follows lives unfolding along the motorway while reflecting on the promises of development and modernity historically attached to the road. The director ta;lks to BDE.

When Norwegian filmmaker Anette Ostrø began work on The Golden Swan, premiering in the International Competition at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, she was stepping into territory that few directors would ever dare confront: reconstructing the abduction and murder of her own brother, Hans Christian Ostrø, kidnapped in Kashmir in 1995 by the militant group al-Faran. Ostrø talks to Business Doc Europe.