Nick Cunningham

Kicking off at Sheffield DocFest and Sunny Side before further roll-out across Europe, the 2025 Ex Oriente Features and Series workshop programs are designed “to support daring, author-driven documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe,” write organisers. This year’s edition brings together 12 feature-length documentary projects and 5 docuseries in development or early production stage, selected for their “creative potential and international relevance.”

The festival may have already opened with Billy Joel: And So It Goes by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, but the Tribeca doc component kicks off in earnest June 6 with the 10-film Documentary Competition, running to June 11 and all world premieres. Additionally, 27 feature docs (21 of which are world prems) are selected for the festival’s Spotlight Documentary section. Richard Ladkani’s feature doc Yanuni, about the fearless female Indigenous chief Juma Xipaia (Brazil), closes the festival on June 14.

Weronika Mliczewska’s Child of Dust won the Golden Horn in International Competition and shared the Golden Hobby-Horse in National Competition (with Wojciech Staroń for The Passion of Agnieszka). Natalia Koniarz’s Silver meanwhile won a Silver Horn for artistic merit, the FIPRESCI prize, the Audience prize, and the Maciej Szumowski Award for social awareness, while its Maciej Kubicki received the award for Best Producer of a Polish documentary. All winners…

IDFA is edging closer to its old spiritual home as Forum 2025 moves into the ITA Theatre on the Leidseplein and all Industry talks and consultancy sessions relocate to the legendary de Balie. Head of Industry Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen informed BDE of further changes, notably the parallel presentation of the Forum Pitch and Producers Connection projects, and a new series of post-pitch Informative Panels. “The renewed set-up underlines a focus on supporting filmmaker teams in making valuable connections and fostering creative partnerships,” she says.

On May 30, the awards of the 20th Krakow FF Industry were handed out, with the top cash award (the Polish Film Institute Award for a project nearing completion) going to Inner Landscapes directed by Zofia Sawicka. In total, nine Polish and Ukrainian projects were pitched in the advanced Docs to Go Section, while 14 new projects were pitched in the Docs to Start. All awards…

Docs Ireland returns to Belfast June 23 to 29 for its seventh edition, showcasing “hard-hitting, eye-opening, and life-affirming documentaries from Ireland and around the world,” organisers write. It also features a “robust” industry programme, connecting filmmakers with leading commissioners and film financiers, drawing a host of influential industry representatives to the city. The festival also presents IGNITE-Docs LASAIR a new Irish language Talent development programme.

In Krakow, debutant Zofia Sawicka pitched her intriguing doc project, which is set on a train progressing through the wilderness. The further the train goes, the more diverse becomes the mosaic of personal stories that shed light on the human condition. “For me, personally, this project is a love poem about power and the beauty of being a human, and this magical feeling of connections and encounters inside the train,” said Sawicka.

Actor/director/producer Dawid Szurmiej presented his doc project that tells the story of the eponymous Polish luminary, the only actress from behind the Iron Curtain to be nominated for an Academy Award, but who was forced into exile at the height of her career as anti-semitic riots swept across Eastern Europe in 1968. “Ida Kaminska went from being the cornerstone of Yiddish culture before the war, to becoming the bridge of a lost culture of 300,000 Jews of Warsaw and the 3 million Jews of Poland,” Szurmiej said of her legacy.

“Jakub Jakubik is a director of remarkable sensitivity—he listens carefully to his characters and the spaces they inhabit,” says Polish producer Michał Sadowski ahead of the KFF Industry Docs to Go presentation of his latest project. In the film, yet another person has drowned in the river near the synagogue converted into a liquor store. Waldek, a long-time teetotaler, the homeless Marek, and the Polish Jew Dawid must confront what more and more is being to resemble a curse.

Ukrainian Sergiusz Bażenov’s feature project tells a story that should never have had to be told. It tells of a filmmaker who becomes a military paramedic in a team with a Dutch volunteer. Together, they witness how war changes people — and themselves. “I’m aiming for a more universal message about war itself, and how it transforms people,” the director tells BDE. “I was certainly transformed by it, and I believe that in today’s world, no one is truly safe, that war can reach anyone. That’s why I want the viewer to imagine themselves in our place. To feel that every death, however distant, diminishes us all.”