Nick Cunningham

The second edition of NLWave, the Utrecht-based two-day showcase of new Dutch film content, came to a close October 2 following the presentation of 35 early stage projects and works in progress. Fifteen of these were documentaries, some of which seem destined for selection at festivals before the end of 2026, into early 2027. The event attracted 60 industry toppers from the sales, distribution and festival sectors.

Syrian documentary The Other Side of the Sun, directed by Tawfik Sabouni, has been selected as Syria's submission for the 99th Academy Awards. The decision marks the country's first entry since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, positioning the film at a moment of profound political and cultural transition. Andana Films, which handles worldwide sales to the film, also announced that New York based Icarus Films has acquired US rights to the film.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers (WCSFP) has announced the nominees for nine of its 16 Buzzies Awards categories. This year sees the introduction of the Best Digital-First category, marking a significant expansion of the Buzzies Awards to recognise digital-first storytelling. Both Best Digital-First and Best Short Form attracted exceptionally strong levels of submissions, “underlining the scale, ambition and importance of creator-led factual content,” organisers write.

“It's a film made together with people, by people, at opposite ends of the global value chain,” Dutch producer Lea Fels told the professional audience at NLWave of the new project The Dawn of the Post Plantation, co-directed by Congolese artist and activist Ce'dart Tamasala together with maverick Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens. “The ones who work the plantation for almost nothing and the ones who make critical art in museums that were historically funded by the wealth taken from those same plantations. And that's where the real friction lies.”

After his debut Four Journeys, the opening film of IDFA 2021, Chinese filmmaker Louis Hothothot again turned his camera inward, his focus once more on his family following the death of his father in 2022. “The central question was how to take care of my mother who is weak, and how to collaborate with my sister who has had a bad relationship with me for a long time,” Hothothot described the work-in-progress to the professional audience in Utrecht. “And underneath, it is about the bigger picture about the women's condition in China.”

MIA returns to Rome from 19 to 23 October with a new market layout that “transforms historic Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini into a district dedicated to the international film and audiovisual industry, fostering encounters between creativity, industry, finance and innovation,” MIA writes. Doc projects are in the frame at the Co-pro Market and the Italians Doc It Better pitch event, while doc-related issues will be discussed and analyzed during the MIA Conference.

“Kabul, Year Zero is the final film in Aboozar Amini’s Kabul trilogy, following Kabul, City in the Wind and Kabul, Between Prayers. But this time, the perspective shifts radically. The story of Kabul and its wars is told through children,” Chinese-Dutch film producer Jia Zhao (Silk Road Films) tells BDE in Utrecht during the second edition of the Dutch project showcase NLWave. “Their voices form a kind of collective chant - not a political shout - about growing up amid repeated cycles of war.”

“Sketches that were never meant to appear in a film form the backdrop for texts written a hundred years ago by the Dutch writer Nescio,” producer Paul Ruven (Talent United) describes to BDE the new project by the maverick Dutch pairing of Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. “By bringing Nescio’s themes into dialogue with contemporary lives and landscapes, they’ve created a film that is both reflective and immediate: a cinematic essay about shifting realities, generational change and the fragile things that still offer us orientation.”

Menno Otten’s latest feature documentary was inspired by a psychosis he observed in his brother, and the sense of calm the man derived from obsessively watching people from his window, finding solace in their seemingly serene gazes. In Still City, Amsterdam is revealed through the gestures of its residents, using 125 years of archival film. “As a city symphony, the film explores our longing for stillness amid the chaos of life,” says director Otten, “revealing what lies behind these moments of quiet and the shared humanity that connects us.”

After losing irreplaceable moments on a hard disk, filmmaker Robert-Jonathan Koeyers returns with his family to the locations they visited to fill in the gaps, all the time recording the process. The film is produced by Richard Valk of Valk Productions. “We are out to make an eclectic, kaleidoscopic film that positions itself as a documentary, an essay film, a fictitious reconstruction of memories, and with several animations to serve as the glue keeping it all together,” Valk tells BDE.