Nick Cunningham

Visions du Réel has put out the call for non-fiction films and projects for the next edition of the festival running 4-13 April 2025 in Nyon, Switzerland. The film call covers four competition sections and four non-competitive sections, while VdR Industry (April 6-9 2025) requests submissions for early pitches and works-in-progress, plus two development labs.

The 67th edition of DOK Leipzig will pay homage to the two esteemed women filmmakers, French director Dominique Cabrera and Spanish animation artist Isabel Herguera. The festival will also honour the memory of late German director and writer Thomas Heise with a lineup of films, an evening event, and this year’s DEFA Matinee.

The team behind the Ukrainian documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth organised an artistic action September 4 at Venice to draw attention to the plight of Ukrainian prisoners of war. On the red carpet, members of the team wore clothing embroidered with the distances from the Lido to various locations where Russians are holding the POWs.

The FIFDH Impact Days professional programme helps independent filmmakers from around the globe to amplify the impact of their work. Year after year, the event facilitates alliances between filmmakers and key players within the vast ecosystem of organisations, policymakers and funders active around Geneva - and beyond. The submissions deadline is 4 October (midnight CET). The next edition of FIFDH Impact Days runs 9-12 March 2025.

Italian Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s Bestiari Erbari Lapideri, which world-premieres Sept 3, is a film divided into three acts and which deals with three distinct and fundamental subjects: animals, plants and stones. “It is first and foremost a reflection on the relationship between humans and nature that exists beyond our impact on it,” the filmmakers say of their latest opus. “We build real and imaginary cages to contain it, but nature always evades our attempt to tame it.”

One hot weekend in 1965 in the US saw three contrasting cultural phenomena. The Beatles arrived to play their iconic Shea Stadium gig, the Watts Riots kicked off in LA and the World Fair was in full swing in Queens, New York. Romanian Andrei Ujică documents this weekend in his rich new documentary, at the same time inserting a fictional romance between two real-life chroniclers of the time. “Small lives are set against the huge backdrop of what's happening in the world,” Ujică, himself an avid Beatles fan, tells Business Doc Europe.

The event will include 29 new projects in Main Pitch, Rough Cut, Balkan Stars and Special Selection sections. “This edition will emphasize documentaries that tell human stories, address pressing social issues, and promote universal values, with a focus on the regions under-represented in the documentary filmmaking industry,” say organisers of the event which takes place September 14-16 during the Al Jazeera Balkans Doc FF in Sarajevo.

The film has picked up a number of high-profile wins including the Panorama Audience Award and Documentary Award at Berlinale 2024, as well as the Tim Hetherington Award at the 2024 Sheffield Documentary Festival. It was recently selected as one of 12 feature documentaries for the upcoming European Film Awards (EFAs) and will soon play at the 2024 Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals.

Directed by award-winning Serbian Mladen Kovačević and produced together with Iva Plemić Divjak, the film will have its world premiere at Giornate Degli Autori on September 3. In the film, drawn to a paradise island in the quest for happiness, the protagonists grapple with the endless tensions between life's possibilities, but the question remains if they are living the life they should be living.

Academy Award nominee Petra Costa’s new film investigates the toxic link between evangelical Christianity and political governance within her home country of Brazil, most notably during the regime of Jair Bolsonaro. The doc presents the former-president as almost puppet-like in his devotion to the firebrand tele-evangelist Silas Malafaia. “We knew they had an intimate political relationship, but as we watched the material, it became so evident the kind of subservience and reverence that Bolsonaro had for Malafaia,” says Costa, who is joined in interview by producer Alessandra Orofino.