Nick Cunningham

Fifteen awards were handed out during the March 3 closing ceremony, of which 9 were won by women. The Best International Feature Documentary Award was given to Farming the Revolution by Nishta Jain, while Best Canadian Feature Documentary was named as The Soldier’s Lagoon by Pablo Álvarez-Mesa. The Special Jury Prize (International Feature Doc) was awarded to Death of a Saint by Patricia Bbaale Bandak. All awards…

The 31st edition of Sheffield DocFest will open 12 June with the World Premiere of Kevin Macdonald’s Klitschko: More Than a Fight. Academy Award®-winning Roger Ross Williams is unveiled as Guest of Honour for 2024. The festival also announces that award-winning filmmaker Anna Hall will be joining the speakers line-up as the subject of the 2024 Channel 4 Interview.

Eight feature-length and 8 short films are chosen by the programmers of 8 leading documentary film festivals, seven of which are united under the Doc Alliance umbrella and “representing different European regions and perspectives on the art of documentary filmmaking.” The winners will be presented at the award ceremony of this year’s guest festival Docudays UA in Kyiv (31 May - 9 June 2024).

“The geographical position of Barcelona makes us a connection point between Latin America, Europe, and the Mediterranean,” new Industry Head Èric Motjer tells BDE of the DocsBarcelona Industry programme (May 6-10), whose success is in finding “a balance between a selection of creatively challenging projects with co-production potential, and ensuring that the market is, at the same time, a space for analyzing and debating the future ahead.”

Do you remember when tech start-ups would find you a place for the night, or locate a taxi just a minute away, or deliver you a burger? Just to make the business of living that little bit easier. Well, now start-ups are dealing in death, enabling grieving folk to communicate with AI-generated versions of their deceased loved ones, via web chat or VR. “[People] don't believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can't deal with the fact that death is finite,” co-director Moritz Riesewieck tells BDE. “And these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”

Over CAD 47,000 (approx. €32,000) in First Look prizes were handed out May 1 as doors closed on Hot Docs Forum 2024. The first prize of CAD 20,000 (€13,600) went to Arrest the Midwife (WT) by Elaine Epstein (US). The second prize of CAD 10,000 (€6,800) went to Autumn of the Patriarch by Anna Bogoliubova (Norway). The third prize of CAD 5,000 (€3,400) went to Under the Flags, the Sun by Juanjo Pereira (Paraguay). The 2024 CMF-Hot Docs Forum Canadian Pitch Prize was won by This Land of Ours by Ngardy Conteh George.

Thirty-one members have put themselves forward for election to the board of the new Documentary Film Council. Voting will open May 13 and close on Friday 31 May, with results to be announced June 3. The UK-based sector-wide body was launched at Sheffield DocFest 2023 with a remit “to represent the UK’s independent documentary community, facilitate transparent communication within the sector and take effective, coordinated action to address the key issues facing the sector.”

Before doors open on the 27th DocsBarcelona (May 2 to 12), Business Doc Europe talks to Artistic Director Anna Petrus about the event that has become one of southern Europe’s must-attend doc fests. “The festival takes place during the first two weeks of May when Barcelona becomes the epicenter of documentary filmmakers and professionals from all over the world,” Petrus underlines.

In Malta, abortion is illegal, almost without exception. In Italy, a single woman cannot have IVF treatment, while only a small number of European countries allow for euthanasia or assisted suicide. So it is not surprising that Europe has seen a boom in cross-border “medical tourism” over recent years, a phenomenon that Greek director Elina Psykou examines in her feature doc Stray Bodies, selected for EFP’s Changing Face of Europe programme. Psykou talks to BDE.

Jana is one of a small number of Protestant pastors in Slovenia. But while her faith remains intact, she begins to question her commitment to life as a cleric as she is increasingly sidelined by the Church authorities. At the same time, her marriage is under severe strain, and she further confides to director Prettner, in the most candid of terms, of childhood sexual abuse that she suffered. “We spent two hours a day when we were driving, and in the car she revealed the most intimate stuff,” the director tells BDE.