Nick Cunningham

The awards of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival were presented August 21 at the National Theatre Sarajevo. Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić’s To Hold a Mountain was handed the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Documentary Feature Film. On August 22, the Audience Award for Best Documentary Film went to We Shall Live Together, directed by Damir Markovina, with an average rating of 5.000.

This week at CineLink Industry Days the Slovakian project Retuning was handed the DAFilms.com VoD Distribution Award. In the feature documentary, as a new political establishment in Slovakia begins to reshape the public broadcaster, its employees face a turning point that raises questions about the future of public media and their role within it. “Some films are born from fascination and creativity, some from frustration and an urgent need to react,” stresses director Sára Prokopová.

Winner of the Docu Talent Award at CineLink Industry Days 2026, Ora et Labora reveals Germany‘s oldest Benedictine monastery at a critical moment of transition, exposing the fragile balance between faith, authority, and existence. “With unprecedented access, I want to invite the viewer into a closed world,” comments director Dzhovani Gospodinov. “Rather than focusing on religion, Ora et Labora becomes an institutional portrait using the monastery as a microcosm to reflect broader questions of masculinity, identity, belonging, and meaning in a rapidly secularizing Europe.”

A total of 24 feature-length documentary projects will be presented during the second edition of Flanders Film Days, running October 6-7 in Ghent, Belgium. The doc component will comprise six new project pitches, nine works in progress and nine completed films, and the event will include new doc works by the likes of Olga Lucovnicova, Maarten Stuyck & Lennart Stuyck and Pieter Van Eecke.

A collective of Iranian artists and academics has published an open letter in the UK-based Tribune magazine demanding an immediate end to the “violence being inflicted on the Iranian people, and the repeated threats by President Trump to destroy the civilian infrastructure.” An accompanying petition “condemns the threats against civilian infrastructure as collective punishment, documents the trauma they inflict, and warns that such rhetoric erodes decades of institution and norm-building meant to protect civilians in armed conflict.”

In Maria Cheresheva and Georgi Totev’s HB0 Avanpost-winning project, a disillusioned Jewish peace activist retreats to her home in rural Bulgaria, finding an unlikely lifeline in a long-distance friendship with a Gazan woman fighting to keep her family alive. “Where Shall We Go? is a film born from an urgent need to preserve humanity at a time when war is trying to erase it,” the directors underlined in Sarajevo.

Peter Akar and Rita Balogh’s feature project Kind of Adults, presented in Sarajevo, is described as “a raw, immersive coming-of-age documentary co-created with charismatic Gen Z teens over six turbulent years.” The film won two awards during CineLink; the DOK Leipzig Preview Award, and the East Doc Caravan Award. “We did not set out to explain a generation. We simply stayed with the same group of young people long enough to witness how time quietly transformed them, and us,” comments Akar.

The Czech Film and Television Academy (CFTA) announced August 19 Pepa Lubojacki’s feature documentary as the Czech candidate for an Oscar® in the category of International Feature Film. The doc had its world premiere in February this year at the Berlinale, where it won the award for Best Documentary Feature, as well as the independent Caligari Film Prize.

Docs Beyond, the new 3-module audience, impact & training programme from the Institute of Documentary Film, seeks to give documentary teams the time, expertise and practical tools to “find its audience, build the right partnerships and turn its topic into meaningful action.” Docs Beyond is intended for producers, directors, screenwriters, distributors and other members of documentary creative teams based in the Czech Republic.

The two titles are Imperium by Sergei Loznitsa (Germany-France-Italy-Lithuania), and Act 3 by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (Ireland-UK). “Our 2026 competition selection brings an astounding array of filmmaking styles to the screen. As ever, it’s been creatively nourishing for myself and the team to encounter each of these works - we’re excited to share these with audiences in October,” comments Kristy Matheson, BFI London Film Festival Director. The 70th edition runs 7 – 18 October 2026.