Nick Cunningham

During the European Film Promotion event, Dutch doc producer Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen will be presenting Willemiek Kluijfhout’s new doc project The Woman Who Made Van Gogh Famous, which tells the story of Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent’s sister-in-law who changed art history by safeguarding his legacy after his death. “It's a brilliant story that needs to be told and it stands for so many more stories that are not in the history books,” says van Leeuwen. “Without her, nobody would know of Van Gogh.”

On May 14, the official MDAG Awards Ceremony took place at the Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw. The Grand Prix – Bank Millennium Award went to To Hold a Mountain by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić. For the first time at MDAG, the award of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) was presented, with the prize going to A Fox Under a Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei, Soraya Akhlaghi. All awards…

“I’m stating the obvious by saying that filmmakers and film festivals have a crucial role to play in preserving democracy, free speech, critical thinking, and in resisting reactionary ideologies,” a candid Pierre-Alexis Chevit, Head of Cannes Docs, tells BDE before doors open on the 2026 edition. The event kicks off May 14, and will culminate May 19 with Doc Day, which this year will include top-level contributions from the likes of Mstyslav Chernov, Mark Cousins, Ema Ryan Yamazaki and David Greaves, as well as the Docs-in-Progress Awards Ceremony.

No Friend but the Mountains wins the DocsBarcelona Award for Best Project. Crossed wins the 3Cat Award for Best Project, the highest-value award at DocsBarcelona Pro (15,000 euros). My Sister Gaza won the ARTE European Talent Development Award and the Al Jazeera Documentary Co-production Award for Best Forum Project, each valued at 10,000 euros. All awards…

In Lucía Flórez’s feature doc project, a boy from a fishing family and a pioneering female marine scientist set out to tag whale sharks for the first time in Peru. Together they forge an unlikely bond, reshaping both the fate of the species and the boy’s future. “We started working on this film in 2023, we are currently in production, and we want to complete the film by the end of 2027,” the director told the Barcelona audience. “We think that by connecting a young protagonist's journey with a scientific and conservation story, we invite audiences to see the complexity of how we relate and coexist with the ocean.”

“It's a film about someone who turned tragedy into a driving force,” Polish director Dorota Roś told the professional audience during her pitch for the feature documentary Diary of Experiences, produced by Telemark. It is a film that details a man’s determination to speak again, through AI, after losing his voice to larynx cancer. For Konrad, the quest is not just about restoring speech, it’s also about reclaiming intimacy, belonging and identity.

Siblings Mohamed Jabaly, Rima Jabaly and Ibrahim Jabaly made a highly emotional presentation of their feature doc project My Sister Gaza during the Public Pitch session of DocsBarcelona. In the film, as bombs fall over Gaza, Rima and Ibrahim find in filmmaking a way to document their family’s displacement, capturing months of struggle to survive and the shattering of lives. Meanwhile a desperately worried Mohamed, in exile in Norway, stays in daily contact. The project is described as “a raw, intimate story of war, love, resilience, and the unbreakable bonds of family.”

Before the Fire follows a Mapuche community in southern Argentina defending their ancestral land and traditions. Their daily life is shattered when hired killers murder one of their members, igniting a struggle for memory and justice. “Crafting a narrative in which a people such as the Mapuche recount their struggle to ‘be’ and, at the same time, to ‘reclaim’ their territory, is not only relevant to Argentina but also to a concept of ‘community’ that is becoming increasingly urgent in the world we inhabit,” says German co-producer Natalia Imaz of parabellum film.

“Invisible Traces aims not only to shift the perception of ala kachuu (bride kidnapping) from a normalized ‘tradition’ to a recognized form of gender-based violence, but also to validate the lived experience of those affected,” renowned docmaker Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva tells BDE of her new feature project. When a theatre performance about bride kidnapping comes to a Kyrgyz village, 78-year-old Asylkan, abducted at 18, steps into the performance and changes its course…

Set within the ancient Hyrcanian forests of northern Iran, the film follows an elderly herding couple who may be among the last practitioners of a traditional form of cattle herding in this region. “What makes the project unique is its intimate, long-term access to the characters over multiple years and seasons, combined with a purely observational approach,” director Yaser Talebi tells BDE. “Rather than constructing conflict externally, the film allows time, landscape, and daily labor to reveal a quiet but profound tension between staying and leaving, continuity and rupture.”