Nick Cunningham

Eight new projects from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine will be presented during the CineLink Industry Days on Sunday August 18. Ji.hlava IDFF will also announce the next cohort of Emerging Producers 2025, and further reminds the doc industry of the August 15 deadline for European and East & Southeast Asian projects applying to Ji.hlava New Visions Forum & Market, as well as for filmmakers from the Caucasus who can have travel/accommodation covered at Ji.hlava.

The Toronto sidebar presents North American premieres of four docs, which includes Chapters two and three of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy. Additionally, seven documentaries are selected for Wavelengths Shorts. TIFF Classics presents the 4K restoration world premiere of Frederick Wiseman’s Essene (1972) which follows daily life in a Benedictine monastery.

Iranian Nasreen wants to sing in a country where women have been banned from public performance since 2016. She is also the mother of two children within a loveless marriage. “Over seven years of filming Nasreen, I closely witnessed her journey to free her voice as a singer and a woman,” says director Leila Amini, sister of Nasreen. “From a vulnerable homemaker, she gradually transformed into a woman in control of her own destiny.”

Grasshopper Film announced August 8 the acquisition of North American distribution rights to Nocturnes by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan. The film, produced by Academy Award®-nominated Sandbox Films (Fire of Love, All Light, Everywhere, Fireball) and Metamorphosis Film Junction, is about the secret lives of moths in the mountains of northern India.

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.