Nick Cunningham

Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo will be the Guest of Honour at IDFA 2026, which takes place from November 12 to 22. IDFA will present a Retrospective of Huezo’s work, alongside a personal Top 10 film selection. Also announced is the Dead Angle: Common Ground focus program; a spotlight on pioneering American filmmaker William Greaves; and the 20th anniversary of IDFA DocLab, themed Shared Realities.

Dawood Hilmandi’s feature documentary Paikar has been selected as the Netherlands’ official entry to the 99th Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category. The film world-premiered at IDFA, where it won the Best First Feature Award and FIPRESCI Award. At Hot Docs it received the Emerging International Filmmaker Award, and has been presented at numerous other festivals worldwide including DOKfest Munich and the Guanajuato International Film Festival. The film is produced by prolific Dutch outfit BALDR Film.

Eight awards were handed out at the end of the 30th Baltic Sea Docs which this year ran September 6 to 11. The inaugural ARTE European Talent Development Award, which comprises a €10,000 development grant in exchange for a first-look deal, was won by the Lithuanian project Two of Us (pictured), directed by Jūratė Samulionytė, and produced by Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė and Danielė Kunčinaitė. A total of 26 documentary projects were selected for this year’s edition.

The Official Special Jury Prize was awarded to Naza by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (UK). The film also won the independent Edipo Re Student Award and the Green Drop Award. The Impact Golden Globes Prize went to Letters from the Silenced Country (Listy) by Andrei Kutsila. while a Queer Lion Award went to Theo Rollason for Queer Edward II. Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas the Mario Serandrei - Hotel Saturnia Award for Best Technical Contribution for The End of Times. The Cinema & Arts Best Film Award was won by Takashi Miike for Shumei: The Living Legacy of Kabuki.

In Letters from the Silenced Country, exiled Belarusian director Andrei Kutsila, now living in Poland, combines archives, found footage and animation, as well as testimonies derived from letters written behind prison walls, to deliver a searing indictment of the regime that governs the country was forced to leave. “I only hope that this film will offer the international audience this opportunity to understand better our society, what is going on now, in my country.”

“At its centre, Cords of Bliss is first of all a film about my brother Bakyt and the relationship between us. I have known him all my life, of course, but in many ways I still do not know him,” director Janyl Jusupjan tells BDE of her new feature project, pitched in Riga. Bakyt may have had hearing loss since childhood, but he is still one of Kyrgyzstan's most respected performers, researchers and teachers of the kyl-kyyak, an ancient two-string bowed instrument deeply connected to Kyrgyz nomadic culture.

For the audience, the value of the project lies in turning upside down a story that everyone believes they know,” producer Raffaele Brunetti of Rome-based B&B Film tells Business Doc Europe of his new project, pitched in Riga. “Nadia Comăneci is not presented as the icon who achieved the first perfect 10 in the history of gymnastics, but as the involuntary protagonist of a state surveillance system. [It] is a spy story that intertwines sport, power, propaganda and personal freedom.”

D might be for doc, but P is for piano, as evidenced in Vladimir Loginov’s latest opus that chronicles the instrument’s construction, from the felling of a tall pine in an Estonian forest to the tinkling of its ivories in a concert hall. “The film completely dispenses with talking heads, traditional interviews, and background music,” producer Janika Möls tells Business Doc Europe. “Instead, the raw industrial rhythms of the workshop—hammering, wood-carving, metal casting, and internal vibrations—form the film’s actual music.”

“Concrete Grassland is a very personal story that…opens onto a larger reality of contemporary Georgia,” producer Elene Margvelashvili tells BDE of Shorena Tevzadze’s new documentary, pitched in Riga. “It is about what happens when institutions weaken, when informal power takes over, and ordinary people are left to find their own ways forward—and how solidarity matters when this happens.”

“Access to our main characters is quite good. Getting them to listen…is another matter,’ says Ukrainian Roman Bondarchuk of his kids, the main subject of his Baltic Sea Docs project My Shadows Grow Faster Than Me. After fleeing Russia’s invasion, Bondarchuk and partner Dar’ya Averchenko, also a filmmaker, document their three children growing into English life. As they prepare to return home, they are unsure whether the Ukraine they long for will feel like home to their children.