MDAG 26

The award ceremony of the 5th MDAG Industry Awards took place May 10 in Warsaw after four pitch sessions, the presentation of 50 projects and over 350 one-on-one meetings. “This year’s edition brought forward stories that are too rarely heard, yet have the power to shift perspectives and expand our shared experience. We believe the projects presented within MDAG Industry will be bold, moving, and uncompromising, and will find their way to audiences around the world,” commented Industry Head Anna Szczypińska.

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.

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.”

At Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG, May 8-17), pitching does not only mean introducing projects in development. With Pole Position, the Warsaw-based festival has created a format designed for completed Polish documentaries already selected for its programme, giving producers the opportunity to present the completed works to international festival programmers, sales agents, distributors and broadcasters. BDE reports.

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.

Polish filmmaker Maciej Bochniak is developing The Lawyer, a new feature documentary following the extraordinary case of Brian Mwenda, a Kenyan man who reportedly passed himself off as a lawyer, built a reputation in Nairobi’s legal circles and became a national controversy after his real credentials were called into question. “I was drawn to Brian’s story because, in a certain way, I had lived it myself — due to my own diagnosed impostor syndrome,” says Bochniak.

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 María Molina Peiró’s Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), a remote robot searches a distant planet both for minerals and signs of life, while far way, beside one of the oldest mines in the world, inhabitants live surrounded by mountains of mineral waste under which are buried both towns and memories. “The main protagonist of this place [is] not even the people or the landscape, but its ecosystem that extends far beyond its own physical and temporal frontiers or limits,” says director Molina Peiró.

One of eccentric artist Arek Pasożyt’s pet obsessions is to find traces of the Tatra Mountains Panorama, a long-lost massive painting from the 1890s that was 115 metres long and 16 metres high - but that was broken up. In Bigger Picture, world-premiering at MDAG, Polish director Mikołaj Janik follows Arek on this journey. The artist is strongly left-wing, Janik tells BDE. He doesn’t believe in consumer culture, and he is relentlessly cheerful, refusing to become downcast about setbacks. He further likens him to an ancient knight on a heroic quest, or to “some kind of Indiana Jones…”

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…