Nick Cunningham

Finnish Weird (aka F-Weird) is Finnish Film Affair's new pitching session, which will showcase up-and-coming talent presenting the most daring and unexplored ideas across a wide range of formats, including docs. "We want FFA to be known worldwide as the event where the most unique and pioneering film, TV and transmedia projects are pitched; the projects that you won't come across elsewhere,” says Alisha Hasan, Head of Industry. FFA runs September 25-27.

Comprising twenty-one titles from 24 countries, the TIFF Docs programme features “candid and unscripted stories, and the best in non-fiction cinema from around the world.” The programme will open with Eddie Huang’s Vice is Broke, in which the former Vice contributor investigates the media company’s rise and fall. The 49th edition of TIFF will run September 5-15. (Still: Vice is Broke by Eddie Huang)

The concept of ‘real’ has undergone fundamental reinterpretation in the digital age, especially since the pandemic, argues (and demonstrates) Italian Adele Tulli in her new documentary. “I began this project with an urge to delve into the ongoing emotional, social and cognitive metamorphoses triggered by our relationship with digital technologies,” she says. “I felt that whatever we used to call real was collapsing and I started looking for ways to represent this collapse.”

Mala Reinhardt takes an existential trip through Germany, Ghana and her own past as she examines aspects of “Blackness, queerness, friendship and the differences that connect us.” She also examines the business of being German. “What's happening now is that people who've grown up with experiences similar to mine are being very vocal about it and they're claiming their space and they're claiming their German identity,” the director tells BDE.

Ulla and Didi are loving and caring parents, even of a serial killer convicted of nearly 90 murders. In their feature doc, German directors Katharina Köster and Katrin Nemec profile the humble mother and father and their attempts to cope with the dreadful reality of their lives. “The relationship [with their son] is characterised by very strong emotions, between great love and affection, but also between contempt and not being able to forgive,” the directors tell BDE.

Transportation of the vulnerable has been a necessity in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of February 24 2022. So has the transportation of the dead, tragically, as the bodies of fallen soldiers are collected and returned to grieving loved ones. “It's something I never experienced before. It's something I had never seen before. I wanted to dig into this topic as a human being and also as a filmmaker, to explore it and also to tell about it,” director Juri Rechinsky tells BDE.

Claudia Marschal’s feature documentary tells a story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and of one man’s refusal to be silenced over the wrongs he had to suffer. It is also the story of a dad whose life is filled with regrets having not taken seriously his son’s pleas for help. At the heart of the film is a recorded deposition that victim/survivor Emmanuel Siess made to the French police. Director Claudia Marschal, Emmanuel’s cousin, talks to BDE.

Industry professionals can now register for the 67th DOK Leipzig (International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film). Accreditation grants exclusive access to the DOK Industry Programme activities and networking events, the festival film programme, masterclasses and talks. DOK Leipzig takes place 28 October to 3 November.

The International Factual Forum enables TV or digital content producers to present and promote their ideas for factual formats and programs to potential stakeholders at MIA (October 14-18 2024). Italians Doc It Better is an initiative aimed at presenting Italian documentaries in post-production, or documentaries completed but not yet released outside Italy.

Documentary films can be submitted from September 16 to November 15, and projects from Dec 10 to Jan 27 2025. The Barcelona International Documentary Film Festival will take place May 8 to 18 2025. The associated DocsBarcelona Industry (May 12-16) is a key meeting point for the professional non-fiction sector in Southern Europe.