Nick Cunningham

“I think these are good times for documentaries as a genre, I'm very optimistic,” DocFest’s Raul Niño Zambrano tells BDE on the eve of the festival’s 32nd roll-out. “Yes, there is something specific in the current climate - with misinformation, with artificial intelligence, with fake news - but I think we are really playing a key role in shaping the landscape of what the discussions can be about. We are giving something necessary, but also something different.”

Netflix has secured UK streaming rights to the feature documentary, The Cancer Conflict, directed by Thomas Meadmore and produced by Go Fish Films. The film, which delves into the personal journeys of two cancer patients navigating the complexities of treatment choices in an era rife with misinformation, is set to premiere on the platform on July 8. Sales are handled by Java Films.

Ouvidor is a massive artist squat in Sao Paolo, whose residents are constantly under threat of eviction from a hostile local government. But ‘ouvidor’ is also a word that means ‘listener,’ which is what director Matias Borgström became as he chronicled preparations for the controversial art biennale that was planned for the establishment. “I like documentaries that, instead of speaking about things in the past, [show] what's happening in the present. So when the spectator who's watching the film is surprised by something that is happening, me, as the director, I'm also surprised,” Borgström tells BDE.

At Dokumentale Good Media Pitch (June 12), Georgian director Ketevan Vashagashvili and producer Nino Chichua made their Impact presentation for 9-Month Contract, which shines the spotlight on Tbilisi’s unregulated surrogacy market. In the film, Zhana is undergoing her third surrogate pregnancy. “There is a lot of power imbalance between prospective foreign parents and surrogate mothers,” said Vashagashvili. “Because of their very different socioeconomic backgrounds, these women - Georgian surrogate mothers – often need legal protection, and they don't have access to it.”

In The Age of Water, brother and sister Isabel & Alfredo Alcántara tell a story with true global resonance, how the over-extraction of groundwater to boost agricultural yields can disturb previously contained toxic chemicals, leading to the contamination of drinking water. This is what happened in the Mexican town of La Cantera, where three infants died of leukaemia, the result of lethal radioactive toxins in the water. But six local women decided to fight back… Co-director Isabel Alcántara discusses her urgent new film with BDE.

To avoid a potential legal dispute, the Berlin-based festival Dokumentale announced during its opening that it will forthwith drop the ‘k’ and go instead by the name of Doxumentale. “Doxumentale is a declaration of love - for our former name, for documentary media, and for the power of constructive collaboration,'”explained festival directors Vivian Schröder and Anna Ramskogler-Witt.

26 projects have been selected for the 29th edition of Baltic Sea Docs, the Riga-based co-production and co-financing forum running 31 August to 5 September 2025. The selection includes 22 projects in development and at production stage, along with four projects in post-production presented in the forum’s Coming Soon section. Once again, there is a strong presence from the Baltic states, alongside projects from Ukraine, Finland, Poland, and other countries in the region.

Vivian Schröder, Impact Director and co-founder of Dokumentale (Berlin), talks to BDE about the event’s second edition, running June 12 to 22. “We are celebrating humanity,” she says of her festival ethos. “We come together in a space as humans and we listen to each other and sometimes we need to become uncomfortable in uncomfortable conversations. These are the times that demand it, and we want to have a space for multiple perspectives and dialogue.”

US actress Kim Novak will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival (La Biennale di Venezia), running 27 August to 6 September 2025. The award will coincide with the Venice world premiere of ‘Kim Novak’s Vertigo’, the new feature doc by writer-director Alexandre O. Philippe. The film is sold by Dogwoof who boarded the project at Cannes 2025.

Doc Edge, New Zealand’s premier international documentary festival and an Oscar® qualifying event, announced June 9 the finalists for its Doc Edge Awards 2025. The Awards will be held on Thursday, 3 July, at the Grand Millennium Auckland, and will be handed out across four categories: New Zealand Feature Film, New Zealand Short, International Feature Film, International Short.