News

Sixteen new Swiss projects plus one Swiss minority co-pro will be presented across the VdR-Industry programmes in 2024. These are in addition to the 25 Swiss (co)productions that feature in the festival’s official selection. The subject of the Switzerland Meets… event this year are the Austria and German doc industries, during which co-production and networking opportunities between professionals from the featured countries will be examined.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Western Canada’s largest documentary film festival running May 2 to 12, will this year showcase a total of 48 features and mid-length films, as well as 34 shorts and a range of Industry events. The festival opens with Shannon Walsh’s Adrianne & the Castle. Closing the festival is Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story.

Crowned the most promising European project at last year’s Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival, Pepa Lubojacki’s debut project If Pigeons Turned to Gold zooms in on four family members, including Lubojacki’s own brother and cousins, unhoused for over a decade and struggling with addiction. The work-in-progress, produced by Wanda Kaprálová for CLAW AV with Guča Films, was presented both in Prague and last month at CPH:DOX.

Lithuanian Viktorija Mickute participated in the Ex Oriente training program in 2023/24, receiving the Cut thru the Noise Award, dedicated to the project team that made the most progress during the workshop at this year’s edition of East Doc Platform. In the film, Mickute follows several Lithuanian women from different generation who were all devotedfans of Latin American telenovelas in the 1990s.

“I made the decision to start working on this film half an hour after I learnt that my father had died,” Polish filmmaker Aneta Ptak tells Business Doc Europe of the genesis of her debut documentary feature Birdie, developed at Ex Oriente. “No other experience can compare to the experience of losing a very important person in your life. It’s like there’s something really terrifying and at the same time sacred about it.”

“When the full-scale invasion [of Ukraine] happened, I realized I needed to create something bigger to remind people about this war not through ruins and suffering, but through life,” Ukrainian-journalist-turned documentarian Mariia Shevchenko tells Business Doc Europe of the genesis of her debut doc feature Keepers of the Ruins. “It’s not [just] about destruction.” The project won the Ex Oriente Fine Cut Award, valued at €1,500.

BDC Discoveries programme entails a six-month process of intense project development across 3 phases (Beldocs in May, Sofia Documental & DOK Leipzig in October) targeted at docmakers from the Balkans, or international teams with Balkan-related projects who are looking for collaboration within the region.

The jury members will bestow the festival’s prizes during the Awards Ceremonies that takes place on Friday 19 April. The Awards for VdR-Industry will be handed out April 17. The 55th edition of Visions du Réel runs April 12–21 2024.

This year's main East Doc Platform Award was handed March 28 to the Polish project Under His Spell by Lukasz Konopa. The HBO Max Award went to director Aneta Ptak for her project Birdie. The Czech Television Award went to the doc series Tito: The West's Favorite Dictator by Hungarian director Bence Máté. All awards follow…

The Russian auteur will attend the Catalan docfest with Architecton, the final part of his ‘planet’ trilogy after ¡Vivan las antípodas! (2011) and Aquarela (2018). “The festival has always accompanied the films of Victor Kossakovsky, who returns with a sensorially shocking film that questions the use that human beings make of natural resources to build and, unfortunately, also to destroy," comments Anna Petrus, Artistic Director of DocsBarcelona.