Geoffrey Macnab

Directors Mocanu and Dragolea follow charismatic environmental activist Tiberiu Boșutar as he tries to stop illegal (and highly lucrative) logging in Romania’s forests. “Our way of dealing with issues [in Romania] is a tragic-comical way,” says Dragolea. “We have a saying that you laugh and you cry…we didn’t search for the humour but the humour was just there for us to uncover with our camera.”

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child Of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and in competition at Krakow FF) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.

When journalist Lina Vdovîi, estranged from her violent father, agrees to help him expose the injustices perpetrated by previous employer, the process reopens the wounds of their past relationship. Nevertheless the experience also proves to be cathartic. Making the film convinced her that “running away” from him wasn’t “healing the wounds from your past,” she tells BDE. She was, instead, giving herself a chance to make peace with him.

Yes, Gar O’Rourke did himself try the mud treatment when he was preparing his new feature doc Sanatorium (selected for Documentary Competition at KFF and sold by MetFilm Sales). He has also done the salt pools the electro-massages and everything else between. Many docs have been made in Ukraine since the invasion but this is surely the gentlest, funniest and most surprising. O’Rourke gets the full treatment from BDE.

Iga Lis’ feature doc profiles Miecia, the woman who runs the smokehouse in the Polish seaside town of Leba that provides, quite simply, the best fish that the director has ever tasted. Lis grew equally fond of the smokehouse owner and her staff. “I found it impossible not to form relationships with those people,” she tells BDE. “At a certain point, I found myself caring deeply about them - and they cared deeply about me.”

Ana Alice de Morais, Artistic Co-Director at RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Festival, and Marc Gauthier, Executive Director, reflected to BDE on their 2025 Cannes Docs experience. “This was our sixth Docs In Progress [in Cannes] in seven years,” Gauthier said of what is now becoming almost an annual event. “Cannes Docs has really managed to create a home for creative documentary…it’s a special thing in this global madness.”

Swedish master Widerberg is on the verge of rediscovery and reappraisal. That is certainly the hope of renowned Swedish film critic Jon Asp and industry veteran Mattias Nohrborg (founder of arthouse distributor TriArt Film). “The relevance of the films today is fascinating,” Nohrborg tells Business Doc Europe. “His films seems so new and fresh and modern.”

French actress Romane Bohringer’s hybrid film is inspired by the book that French politician and MP Clémentine Autain wrote about her mother, the troubled French movie star Dominique Laffin. But the film began to take on a very personal dimension. At first, the director planned a conventional fictional adaptation. However, during the writing process, she kept on hearing her own story “knocking at the door,” she tells BDE.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells BDE of his scorching new feature documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 which launched in the Cannes Premiere section earlier this week.

In his feature doc debut, the return of independently-minded Déni Oumar Pitsaev to his home in Chechnya causes a family feud. His relatives all want him to get married and to go by traditional Chechen codes of family and masculinity. This was not always easy to record on film. “Some things that were more rough, raw, emotional and private I did not include in the film because it was too personal and my father was too vulnerable,” the director tells BDE.