Nick Cunningham

Visions du Réel unveiled April 22 the winners of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry. More than CHF 80’000 in cash and in-kind prizes were awarded to 12 projects during the awards ceremony in Nyon. The Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, which grants €20,000 to support international co-productions at an early stage, was handed to Uganda by Daniel Mann. The final visions sud est Award, which has long encouraged independent film production in countries with low production capacities with a CHF 10'000 prize, went to Job 1:21 by Samuel Suffren.

MDAG Industry will take place from 7 to 11 May in Warsaw’s State Ethnographic Museum. ”From working with personal and family archives, through giving voice to communities living in the shadow of political change, to practical accessibility tools – this year, the Industry programme brings together filmmakers, producers and institutions who treat inclusivity not as an add-on, but as a foundation of contemporary documentary cinema,” organisers write. ”The guiding theme of this year’s programme is the voices that have been kept on the margins for far too long.”

With a program structured around five thematic threads of Art, Change, Female Lens, Nature and Together, this year’s edition presents a total of 46 international documentary feature films and 12 short films. Non-fiction book readings, live podcasts, and a virtual reality exhibition will offer alternative entry points into documentary storytelling. Running May 27 to June 7, Doxumentale “transforms Potsdamer Platz into a vibrant meeting space for film, literature, podcasts, and immersive media."

Shot in the Persian Gulf, the feature doc Heat, directed by Jacqueline Zünd, deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. “It's like a magnifying glass amplifying all these differences, especially the economic and social disparities,” Zünd tells Business Doc Europe. “Because there is a certain [very high] temperature, rich people do not leave their houses anymore… Meanwhile, the poor people are dying out there, or maybe having heatstroke, while delivering food at noon when they call for lunch. It's really crazy.”

In her short film Une chambre à elles A Room of Their Own), three women, Claude-Emmanuelle, Régina and Nicole, apply make-up before going out. As we watch, all three reflect on intimate aspects of their lives, from suicide to gender transition to the strength that can be derived from ‘pink femininity’. “I don’t wear make-up myself, but I’ve always been drawn to this ritual,” the director tells BDE. “These are often moments when confidences emerge naturally, when intimate stories are more easily shared.”

We don’t know why the prisoners within the high-security Volterra jail are serving time, but under the supervision of Venice Golden Lion-winning theatrical director Armando Punzo, who has entered the prison every day for the past 38 years, they are producing wonderful theatre. In Dentro, French director Elsa Amiel chronicles the process. “I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the prison — a place once known as one of Italy’s worst, transformed through theatre into a place of avant-garde creation,” she tells Business Doc Europe.

DOK.fest Munich has unveiled the programme for its 41st edition. 106 films from 49 countries will be screened, 23 of which will have their world premiere, and a further 59 films will have their international or German premiere. Films will compete for three main prizes, the VIKTORIAs for International and German Competitions, and for Cinema of Urgency. This year, the programme team selected from 1,440 submissions – a new record for the festival. DOK.fest Munich runs this year May 6 to 18.

Melbourne-based Chinese director Vee Shi may have set out to make a fictionalised account of the lives of his parents, but the resulting film is as viscerally verité as one can imagine, telling of an unhappy marriage, domestic abuse and having to deal with parental illness and financial struggle. “It's not 100% factual information, but it's an accurate representation of the emotional truth,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

The Brazilian project, directed by Ana Ahranha and produced by Mariana Genescá (Amana Cine) highlights the challenges around the protection of farms and nature against pesticides. It also features the main character's desire to fight for a better world for her daughter. The team wins two free Market Passes for Sunny Side of the Doc 2026, which will take place from June 22 to 24, 2026, in La Rochelle, France.

Stuck in Berlin after the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Viv Li, who comes from solid, traditional stock back in Beijing, decided to embrace the German capital’s ‘alternative’ culture scene. Her resulting (mis)adventures are as hilarious as they are poignant, especially when seen in counterpoint to her sober, albeit loving, family life back home. “I realised that there is less and less of ‘binary’ in how we live. There are a lot of differences, but in the end, we're the same,” she suggests to Business Doc Europe.