Nick Cunningham

Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen is selected to represent the Netherlands as Producer on the Move at Cannes 2026. Producers on the Move is European Film Promotion’s (EFP) long-standing programme to promote promising producers and foster international co-productions. On the Croisette, van Leeuwen will be presenting director Willemiek Kluijfhout’s new doc project The Woman Who Made Van Gogh Famous.

Running June 10 to 15, the festival will open with the protest doc We, The Hated by UK doccer Rich Felgate, ahead of a programme that presents 80 feature films and 24 shorts, including 45 World Premieres, 17 International Premieres, 5 European Premieres, and 35 UK Premieres from 64 Countries. “In 2026, we are navigating a world defined by both profound uncertainty and constant transformation. Our theme, Realities in Motion, captures this momentum, reflecting how our lives are continually reshaped by collective action,” says Raul Niño Zambrano, Creative Director.

The 15th Finnish Film Affair (FFA) invites project applications from feature films and documentaries with international potential. The Showcase Day, taking place on Thursday, 24 September, offers an opportunity to present projects to international industry professionals and network with guests ranging from sales agents and co-producers to investors and festival programmers. Application deadline: Friday, 5 June 2026.

The 11th edition of the Verzió DocLab (14 – 18 November) is accepting applications, offering emerging European documentary filmmakers a “high-impact, all-in-one development platform” combining an intensive workshop on editing and story development, the presentation of a trailer or an excerpt to decisionmakers, and one-on-one meetings with international industry professionals.

This year, MDAG Polish Competition will feature ten “outstanding” films competing for three awards – the Best Polish Film Award, the Best Production Award from Smakjam Studio, and the Polish Arthouse Cinemas Association Award. “These are titles awarded at the most important international festivals [and] many of them will have their world premieres,” write organisers. All will celebrate their Polish premieres. The 23rd edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity runs May 8 to 17 within 7 Polish cities, and online from May 19 to June 1.

The 66th Krakow Film Festival (May 31 to June 7) will open with Marc Isaacs’ Synthetic Sincerity. The festival has also unveiled first titles selected for its International and National Competition sections. “The [opening] film we have selected is a vital contribution that compels us to reflect upon the transformation unfolding before our eyes – the changing role of the creator and our relationship to AI,” says festival director, Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła.

The prizes of the 57th Visions du Réel were handed out April 24. Director Xisi Sofia Ye Chen won the Grand Prize of the International Feature Film Competition with From Dawn to Dawn, her first feature-length film. Hassen Ferhani received the Burning Lights Competition Award for Alea Jacarandas. The National Competition Jury awarded Nicole Nicole, Lauren Dällenbach’s feature debut, and the Audience Award went to Birds of War by Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak.

The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum is a financing, co-production, and networking platform dedicated to supporting documentary production in all its diversity and creativity, and which has served as a successful launchpad for numerous European, Asian, and U.S. documentaries. Projects presented at the Forum over the past three years have gone on to premiere at major festivals, including Hot Docs, Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlinale, Cannes, and Locarno. The submission deadline is April 30.

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.”