MIA 26

Barcelona’s most improbable Russian connection has landed at Rome’s MIA market. Boris Yeltsin, Forever Friends, a new doc project directed by Manuel Rodríguez, will explore the extraordinary relationship between the former Russian president and the Catalan doctors who saved him, drawing on previously unseen archives and first-hand testimonies. The film will revisit how emergency surgery brought Yeltsin to Barcelona and how that unlikely bond endured through some of the most turbulent years of post-Soviet politics.

Iconic Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti is a woman on a mission. Having completed her historic tenure as Director-General of CERN, during which time the Higgs Boson particle was discovered, she is now facing her most complex battle yet in advocating for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), the multi-billion-dollar successor to the Large Hadron Collider, and which represents “humanity’s next attempt to answer some of the universe's greatest remaining mysteries.”

More than four decades after murders and arson attacks terrorised northern Italy and Germany, questions remain about the neo-Nazi group Ludwig and the ideology behind its crimes. Simone Manetti’s Ludwig – The Black Angels investigates those unresolved issues through court records, archival material and first-hand testimony. The 82-minute documentary, courtesy of Italy’s B&B Film with Germany’s Beetz Brothers Film Production and Hearst Networks Italy, is now completed and will be presented at Rome’s MIA as part of the Italians Doc It Better programme.

The moka pot may be an icon of Italian domestic life, but its story is not simply about how coffee is made. In moka, with a small m, director Matteo Severgnini – grandson of inventor Alfonso Bialetti – revisits the people who turned an aluminium coffee maker into a global design icon, drawing on previously unseen family archives to ask how innovation emerges amid technological change. Produced by TIWI, the 56-minute documentary is in the final stages of post-production and will be presented at Rome’s MIA 2026.

French director Mathilde Damoisel is examining more than a century of Italian emigration in Ciao Italia!, a 90-minute documentary that challenges the familiar narrative of successful integration by looking at the discrimination, labour struggles and changing racial identities experienced by Italian communities abroad. Produced by Paris-based Hauteville Productions in co-production with Arte France, the film is currently in production and will be presented at the Doc Pitching Forum during Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23.

From cycling across Africa to negotiating Siberian rivers in temperatures as low as -60°C, Italian explorer Lorenzo Barone has spent much of his adult life seeking out places where survival depends on his own decisions. But the people waiting for him at home are just as central to Extreme Land Solo, a completed 54-minute documentary by Filippo Lupini that will be presented in the Italians Doc It Better showcase at Rome’s MIA, running October 19–23, 2026.

French filmmaker Sophie Bassaler is developing Salò, Pasolini’s Last Cry, a 90-minute feature documentary revisiting Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), not simply as a landmark of cinematic provocation but as a warning about the mechanisms of power that, she argues, still shape contemporary society. The France–Italy co-production, produced by Philippe Touzery of Wendigo Films alongside Matteo Tortone of Malfé Film, will be presented at the MIA market in Rome, running October 19–23, 2026, as part of its Doc Connect: One-on-One programme.

MIA returns to Rome from 19 to 23 October with a new market layout that “transforms historic Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini into a district dedicated to the international film and audiovisual industry, fostering encounters between creativity, industry, finance and innovation,” MIA writes. Doc projects are in the frame at the Co-pro Market and the Italians Doc It Better pitch event, while doc-related issues will be discussed and analyzed during the MIA Conference.

Eleven feature documentaries, two docuseries and two TV one-offs have been selected for the MIA (Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo) 2026 Co-pro Market. A further seven documentaries will be presented in the new Doc Connect programme. Across all sectors, 67 projects will be presented this year, selected from more than 530 submissions from 82 countries. The upcoming edition of MIA will run October 19 to 23 in Rome.

The deadline for submissions of projects to MIA’s Italians Doc It Better showcase is September 6. Italians Doc It Better looks to facilitate the circulation of new Italian documentaries by providing producers with a platform to present their projects and secure international distribution. Eligible titles must be 100% Italian productions or co-productions in which Italy holds a majority share.