Nick Cunningham

This year's main East Doc Platform Award was handed March 28 to the Polish project Under His Spell by Lukasz Konopa. The HBO Max Award went to director Aneta Ptak for her project Birdie. The Czech Television Award went to the doc series Tito: The West's Favorite Dictator by Hungarian director Bence Máté. All awards follow…

The Russian auteur will attend the Catalan docfest with Architecton, the final part of his ‘planet’ trilogy after ¡Vivan las antípodas! (2011) and Aquarela (2018). “The festival has always accompanied the films of Victor Kossakovsky, who returns with a sensorially shocking film that questions the use that human beings make of natural resources to build and, unfortunately, also to destroy," comments Anna Petrus, Artistic Director of DocsBarcelona.

Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies & Radical by Christopher Zalla win the Grand Jury Awards. Other winners include Mediha by Hasan Oswald and Mediha Ibrahim Alhamad; Kix by Bálint Révész and Dávid Mikulán; Eddyʼs oorlog by Joost van der Valk, and Mast-del by Maryam Tafakory. The Dutch human rights festival runs to Saturday March 30.

The Innovation WIP is aimed at documentary or documentary-inspired stories, regardless of category, format or technology, whether XR (virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality), podcasts, video games, dome creation or videomapping. Five creative teams will be selected to benefit from tailor-made support and presentation of their work during Sunny Side of the Doc, running June 24-27. The application deadline is April 2.

Ten film professionals will award the Docs&Pearls, Docs&Cat and DOC-U prizes at DocsBarcelona 2024. The 27th edition of the Catalan festival will run 2-12 May, while DocsBarcelona Industry is set for 6-10 May. Agent of Happiness, by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, will open the festival on May 2.

Arkadiusz Bartosiak’s portrait of distinguished Polish actor, director, manager and social activist Andrzej Seweryn will open the Polish festival May 26 as well as compete in the National Competition. “This is not a biographical film but a dynamic portrait of an eminent European artist captured in motion,” the festival writes.

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.