MDAG 26

Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert talk to BDE about their new doc which, in turn, focuses on the work of a rehabilitation centre for victims of war, a Ukrainian transgender artist and dancer now living in Poland, and the Open Group artistic collective that explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian civilians. “I think we were quite sensitive observers,” says co-director Englert who, with Szumowska, learned the power of quiet observation when studying film in Łódź. “That’s the way of storytelling we always favour. Without words, you can say a lot.”

Polish filmmaker Łukasz Kowalski is developing Children of the Black Garden, a new feature documentary rooted in the toxic legacy of Silesia’s industrial past, and the hidden story of a doctor who exposed mass lead poisoning among children in the 1970s. Produced by Anna Mazerant and Kowalski himself through 4.30 Studio, the project is among the titles being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8.

Marcin Borchardt explains to BDE what led him to make his new feature documentary My Themersons, about the life and work of artists and filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. “What moves me most…generally is their refusal to separate intellectual life from emotional life,” Borchardt says. “Stefan could write highly sophisticated philosophical texts and at the same time produce works full of absurd humour, tenderness and vulnerability. They were both profoundly serious and profoundly playful at once. That combination is extremely rare.”

International FIPRESCI members will vote for the best documentary film of the past year, making this award “one of the most important distinctions in global documentary cinema,” writes Millennium Docs Against Gravity. “It is a great honor for MDAG and for the Polish film industry that, among all festivals worldwide, [it] has been chosen as the place where this exceptional award will be presented.” The first winner will be announced during the MDAG opening ceremony on May 7 2026.

During the May 7 Opening Ceremony of the 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the feature documentary Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović was awarded the inaugural FIPRESCI Documentary Grand Prix, following a vote by members of the International Federation of Film Critics from around the world. The film has already received the European Film Award for Best European Documentary and was recognized at the Rotterdam festival, where it won both the Tiger Award in the Main Competition and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.

At MDAG 2026, US filmmaker Alan Berliner delivered a generous masterclass titled Think Like a Filmmaker, guiding the audience through more than four decades of work built around memory, family, identity, insomnia, archive and the “fragility of the human condition.” Opening the session, Berliner gently questioned the very idea of a masterclass. “I have a little trouble with this word 'master,'” he said. “I’ve been making films for more than 40 years and really what that means is that I’ve made more mistakes than you.”

The award will go to one of 12 feature documentaries about luminaries working within the arts – ranging from film, music, and theatre to literature and the avant-garde. Festival partner The National Fryderyk Chopin Institute funds the €2000 prize. The 23rd MDAG will take place from May 8-17, 2026 in cinemas across seven Polish cities (Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdynia, Poznań, Katowice, Łódź, and Bydgoszcz), and online from May 19 to June 1.

In Freak Show, Lukasz Ronduda and Filip Pawlak work with a group of disabled performers as they prepare for a show at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. The idea was to explore different ways in which they could represent the disabled body on stage while reflecting on the pain and contradictions of disabled life. It is a work that forces audiences to confront their preconceptions and prejudices about disabled bodies. Pawlak discusses the film with BDE.

On May 14, the official MDAG Awards Ceremony took place at the Dramatic Theatre in Warsaw. The Grand Prix – Bank Millennium Award went to To Hold a Mountain by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić. For the first time at MDAG, the award of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) was presented, with the prize going to A Fox Under a Pink Moon by Mehrdad Oskouei, Soraya Akhlaghi. All awards…

MDAG Industry will take place from 7 to 11 May in Warsaw’s State Ethnographic Museum. ”From working with personal and family archives, through giving voice to communities living in the shadow of political change, to practical accessibility tools – this year, the Industry programme brings together filmmakers, producers and institutions who treat inclusivity not as an add-on, but as a foundation of contemporary documentary cinema,” organisers write. ”The guiding theme of this year’s programme is the voices that have been kept on the margins for far too long.”