Awards 25/26

Flemming Fynsk’s intimate portrait of Ginny Williams (1927-2019) brings to life the story of a collector who seemed to have an instinct for female artists who were destined to take the art world by storm. “I'm all about character and heart and originality and I just had this feeling that it's rare to meet a character like her, somebody who's so confident in who she is, and how she interacts with the world. And I had a great desire to capture it,” Fynsk tells BDE.

In American Sons, director Andrew James Gonzales follows a brotherhood of Marines a decade after their deployment to Afghanistan, as they struggle to overcome the trauma of combat and the loss of their best friend, Corporal JV Villarreal. “It goes back to what Charles Dickens said in A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the director tells BDE. “Even though it was horrible, it was also the greatest experience they’ve ever had…the love you have for someone who you’re willing to die for and who is willing to die for you, we cannot imagine.”

The part-animated feature documentary tells the story of the firebrand Nora Morales de Cortiñas, aka Norita, who became a symbol of resistance in Argentina after her son Guistavo was disappeared in the 1970s, along with thousands of other young activists. With other grieving women, she founded the campaigning Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. “It's just remarkable. It's phenomenal to think that a group of housewives basically toppled a military regime,” says co-director Jayson McNamara.

It is one of the most famous photos in history. In 1968, two days after the Tet Offensive, the South Vietnamese General Loan was photographed executing Captain Lēm of the invading Vietcong with a single shot to the head. “For the Vietnamese, it was really the definition of the civil war. It was a Vietnamese brother shooting another Vietnamese brother,” director Naja Pham Lockwood underlines to BDE of her short documentary On Healing Land, Birds Perch. “I wanted to tell the stories behind that photo.”

Producer George Chignell talks to Business Doc Europe about Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, an Oscar contender that was released in the US this autumn by Neon. Peck uses Orwell’s work, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, to look at the growth of authoritarianism today, everywhere from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russian, from Myanmar to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. “For me, it was a gift to work with a director like him,” Chignell says of her association with Peck.

“I struggled with addiction and depression for most of my young adult life,” filmmaker Ben Rekhi clarifies to BDE of one of his main motivations for making his Oscar-qualifying short, The Breakthrough Group. The 40-minute film looks in depth at the remarkable work of The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City, a programme providing care and “tough love” for those at the lowest ebb of drug or alcohol dependency.

Christopher Radcliff’s short film We Were the Scenery is both tiny and epic in scale, as it tells the story of two Vietnamese war refugees, the parents of the film’s producer and writer Cathy Linh Che, who, after escaping to The Philippines, were drafted as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “Their VHS copy of the film sits on the shelf next to all their home video tapes,” says the director of Che’s parents now. “It's something that they use as a sort of tool for reminiscing in the same way that they do their home videos.”

Food Delivery, about the struggles of Filipino fishing folk, has won many plaudits, but is also facing down some heavy criticism – from the Chinese government. “I did not ask for this personally. Who would want to make a film that would go against a superpower like China?” director Baby Ruth Villarama reasons to BDE. “But where I was presented with the truth, the lived experience of our fisherfolk, the very people who are working in quiet dignity, and when I realised there are actual threats to our freedom and our food security, we had no choice but to embrace the story and to tell it as humanely as possible.”

The Tale of Silyan works on many levels. It tells the tale of an injured stork being nursed back to health by kindly farmer Nikola, while also highlighting the financial plight of the rural Macedonian farming communities. It is also a story of economic migration as Nikola’s wife, daughter and grandchild are forced to move to Germany. It furthermore recounts the myth of Silyan, a prodigal son who, after turning against his father, was turned into a stork. “This is a story I grew up with,” Kotevska tells BDE of Silyan’s punishment. “My grandparents told it to me while we were observing the storks as kids.”

In his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world-premiered at Sundance 2025 and is now competing for the Feature Doc Academy Award, Charlie Shackleton ruminates both over his abandoned investigation into a notorious (and unsolved) murder as well as the limitations of the true crime genre. “It does increasingly feel that absolutely the only thing you can get made is true crime or celebrity documentary. And it feels really suffocating,” Shackleton laments to BDE.