DocsBarcelona 25

The 28th edition of the Catalan fest launches May 8, heralding 11 days of frenetic professional and public-facing doc activity, the whole thing kicking off with Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, which offers a reminder of the dark role that cinema played 80 years ago, before the Allies’ liberation of Europe. “It felt important to revisit Riefenstahl’s legacy — not to glorify it, but to interrogate it,” says incoming co-director Maria Colomer. “Her images shaped a totalitarian vision, and the film asks us to confront how beauty can be weaponized.”

“This film is stitched to my heart and soul. There is blood in it – family - and roots that go back decades, tangled with the lives of the communities who welcomed us not as filmmakers, but as kin,” director Alejandro Valbuena (Curare Films, Canada/Columbia) tells BDE ahead of his rough-cut presentation of The Wind’s Thirst at DocsBarcelona Industry.

Andres Veiel’s new documentary makes a damning case against notorious director Leni Riefensthal, whose patron was Adolf Hitler. The film comes at a time when Germany is seeing a highly alarming wave of right-wing extremism. “[It] is a warning not to accept this new nationalism and celebration of the strong. That is what’s Riefenstahl’s ideology is. We are really experiencing a renaissance of it,” says Veiel, who is joined in interview by producer Sandra Maischberger.

Guillermo F Florez pitched his feature doc Lord Take Me Soon as a Rough Cut in Barcelona in 2024. This year the finished work world-premieres in Official Selection. The film concerns 86-year-old Carmen - previously a nun and the taker of several lovers – who wanted to end her life through euthanasia. ““Thanks to Carmen’s personality, it’s mostly a life-affirming story, and a portrait of a Quixotesque woman who suffered the oppression of an extremely conservative society, especially of women,” Florez tells BDE.

A New Yorker with an astonishing voice and the most vagabond of creative sensibilities, 82-year old Meredith Monk is the genius that few people have ever heard of. Unless, of course, you’re David Byrne or Björk, or Philip Glass for whom “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” “I've talked to people who've had a whole career producing music documentaries, and the first question they ask is, ‘is she related to Thelonious?” director tells BDE of his inimitable but largely unknown subject.

Finnish producer Pasi Hakkio (Wacky Tie) and director Joel Karppanen pitched the feature debut Labour Day, about the lives of food couriers operating within many of the world’s capitals. “We’re often told not to bite the hand that feeds us. But in the era of tech oligarchy, we feed the hand! Withdrawing from platforms isn’t an act of defiance against a benevolent provider — it’s reclaiming what was always ours,” says the director.

In their film selected for DocsBarcelona Competition, Iranian filmmakers Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni chronicle the ebbs and flows in the life of their main protagonist, Sara Shahverdi, the motorcycling former midwife from a remote Iranian village who took the leap into local politics. “From the very beginning, we knew the motorcycle would be like an essential character in the film,” Khaki says, not least because it is a symbol of Sara’s freedom and her defiance.

Capitán (Colombia/Spain) by Laura Otárola took home the DocsBarcelona Award for Best Project during the event’s May 15 awards ceremony. Gaza Sunbirds (Spain/Belg/UK) by Flavia Cappellini won the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel Co-production Award. The awards ceremony marked the conclusion of DocsBarcelona Industry. This year’s edition brought together more than 750 accredited professionals from around the world for four days of pitching sessions, networking events, and many industry-oriented activities.

German production and sales maestro Heino Deckert was handed the 2025 Docs d’Honor Award during the opening ceremony of the 28th DocsBarcelona. The festival is screening two of his films, the Oscar-nominated Rabbit à la Berlin by Polish Bartosz Konopka, and Heimat is a Space in Time, the final film of Thomas Heise, who passed away in 2024. It is the film Deckert is most proud of. “When this film is shown even in 50 years time, people will understand the whole of the 20th Century when they watch it.”

Impact is at the core of Aline Juárez and Juan Francisco Donoso’s All We Have Is Us, which follows socio-environmental movements defending the Atacama Desert (Chile) and the Jadar Valley (Serbia) against increasingly pervasive lithium mining. "[This] is more than a documentary: this film will be a masterclass, a resource to foster dialogue, inspire action, and connect struggles across continents," says Juárez.