Nick Cunningham

24 hours after 10 Hot Docs programmers exited the festival en masse, the Canadian doc fest unveiled its selection of 168 documentaries representing 64 countries, featuring 51 world and 32 international premieres. The 2024 festival will open April 25 with the international premiere of Luther: Never Too Much, directed by award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter. Hot Docs 2024 runs April 25 to May 5, promising “an unparalleled celebration of non-fiction storytelling on a global scale.”

European Film Promotion (EFP) and Hot Docs announced March 26 the nine titles selected for this year’s annual Changing Face of Europe programme which seeks “to illustrate and examine a new and contemporary Europe from a cultural, social, geo-political and economic perspective.” Hot Docs – Canadian International Documentary Festival, takes place 25 April – 5 May 2024.

Nine projects have been selected for the May 10 Progress Pitching session of Millennium Docs Against Gravity Industry 2024. These include new works by Ukrainian Alisa Kovalenko (We Will Not Fade Away, 2023) and the Polish Maciej Cuske (The Whale from Lorino, 2019). A 10th project will be announced this week at the close of this week’s East Doc Pitching Forum (Prague). Millennium Docs Against Gravity Industry runs May 9-13 in Warsaw.

Danish production company Snowglobe announced March 25 that Journeyman Pictures has acquired world sales rights for David Borenstein’s documentary Can’t Feel Nothing, following its world premiere in the F:ACT Award section at CPH:DOX. The film is written by Borenstein and co-writer Christian Einshøj, and produced by Mikkel Jersin, Katrin Pors and Eva Jakobsen.

The Flats by Alessandra Celesia won the main Dox:Award prize. The F:ACT AWARD prize was handed to Black Snow by Alina Simone. The NORDIC:DOX Award went to The Son and the Moon by Roja Pakari. The NEW:VISION Award was won by Preemptive Listening by Aura Satz, while the NEXT:WAVE award went to Grand Me by Atiye Zare Arandi. The HUMAN:RIGHTS Award was handed to ‘Black Box Diaries’ by Shiori Ito, while the Audience Award went to No Other Land by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal. All winners and citations…

Greek director Elina Psykou, whose Stray Bodies plays in CPH:DOX F:ACT AWARD, spoke to BDE about the recent protests in Thessaloniki over the film’s poster that depicts a semi-naked and pregnant Madonna nailed to the Cross. Psykou, who received online hate mail over past weeks, says she is apprehensive about the film’s wider opening in Greece on March 28, but will not be deterred from using the same poster. “I don't want to let fear conquer,” she says. “But I have to admit that after all these days, I'm very exhausted.”

The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY awards 2024 were announced March 21 in Copenhagen. Four awards were handed out to CPH:FORUM projects looking for gap-financing as well as CPH:LAB projects with their focus on immersive non-fiction. Three CPH:LAB project awards were handed out at the Prototype Event in Odd Fellow Palace on March 18. All winners…

Three Catalan documentaries will compete in the Official Section of the DocsBarcelona 2024 International Documentary Film Festival, and nine more will compete in the new Docs&Cat section. A total of twelve titles make up the DocsBarcelona's “firmest commitment to the Catalan creative talent and industry, with which the event vindicates the particular look that Catalan cinema dedicates to the documentary genre,” write organisers.

The official selection includes 165 films from 50 different countries, with gender parity for the second year running, the festival underlines. These include 88 world premieres and 14 international premieres. The 55th edition will open with the Danish film As the Tide Comes In by Juan Palacios (co-directed by Sofie Husum Johannesen). VdR 2024 runs 12-21 April.

Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s delicious and elegiac feature documentary describes a love triangle of sorts, between a female Irish aristocrat, the revered 20th Century architect Le Corbusier and the house that she built in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur, which he later appropriated. Minger had been pre-warned about the allure of the brilliant Eileen Gray. “Beatrice, be careful because if you enter the Gray zone, you'll never get out of it,” she was told.