Nick Cunningham

One Inch Eastward will be the second film in a trilogy about the Washington/Moscow relationship that played out some 30+ years ago. Moscow Nights, the first film, told the story of how Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush ended the Cold War. This new film concerns the Yeltsin and Clinton era. “We were drawn in to these stories by our love of the archives, then we became fascinated by what they revealed to our filmmakers’ eye,” producer Brendan Culleton tells Business Doc Europe.

“I didn’t fully choose the subject, it also chose me,” says Spanish filmmaker Guillermo F Florez of his feature doc nearing completion and presenting this week in Barcelona. “I found myself embarked in the most unexpected project: a comedy about an old woman planning her suicide.” That old woman is the irrepressible Carmen (86), who lived through the Civil War, was previously a nun, was married then divorced in a conservative society, and then took several lovers, thereby following her own very unique path.

Born to Fight explores the developmental journey of Tunisian female kickboxer Nawres from 2017 to 2024 within the context of the Arab Spring. “While many stories focus solely on the journey to Europe and the challenges faced there, this film shines a spotlight on the resilience and determination of those who opt to confront adversity head-on in their own communities,” Danish producer Rikke Tambo tells BDE.

Dutch Juul van der Laan describes her interactive project I M U as “an AI essay film installation in which I, the maker, manipulate the viewer’s image using deepfake - live. It is a personal confrontation with the technology and a meditative intervention on what the self and your self-image really are.” The project is presented within the inaugural New Tech Pitch session at DocsBarcelona Industry.

Six new teams are announced to compete for prize funding for innovative new audio projects June 15 at Sheffield DocFest 2024. A grand first prize of £5,000 will be awarded, with £2,000 going to the runner up. The award is designed to celebrate the global trend towards solo and episodic listening to factual audio. Sheffield DocFest runs June 12-17.

The True Film by Christina Zimmermann wins the DOK.digital – Award for New Narrative Formats, while the DOK.archive award goes to Our Sister Angela – Black Power in the GDR by Katharina Warda and Jascha Hannover. The DOK.talent Award is given to the project Politik ist persönlich by Indira Geisel (HFF München). All awards…

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.”