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Women Speaking tells the intriguing story of the Albanian Burrnesha, women who give up their femininity and live as men in order to gain a voice, experience personal freedom and fight for equality. “Although we see that their lives seem to be free and they have self-determination, there is still sadness and painful consequences,” co-director Nrecaj told the Leipzig audience.

After Katharina Pethke returned to her job at the art academy after giving birth she began to realise that what makes her tick an artist was not so easily reconciled with her new role as a mother. Her own mother and grandmother before her gave up their careers as artists to stay home. And now her mum thinks Katharina should do the same. The director examines this dilemma in her feature doc Reproduction.

Andreas Hartmann and Arata Mori’s D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize-winning project tells of the Japanese phenomenon of ‘night moving’ companies that help people to vanish without a trace. “From the beginning I was kind of very fascinated with this idea of the possibility to restart your life, but also very intrigued about the consequences of leaving everything behind,” co-director Hartmann told the Leipzig audience.

DOK Leipzig announced 10 October its DOK Industry award winners. These were the Saxon Award for the Best Documentary Project by a Female Director (€5000), the Current Time TV Award (€2000) and the Unifrance Doc Award (all awarded to DOK Co-Pro Market projects). The D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize was handed out to the winning project within DOK Preview Germany while Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg Award was given to the winning project in DOK Short n’ Sweet.

Flemish producer Kristian Van der Heyden and co-director Jimmy Hendrickx updated BDE on the status of their project about the very real spectre of modern-day human slavery. The makers are looking to complete the film by the end of 2023 ahead of a Q2/3 festival roll-out in 2024. “I learned a lot from Jeremy about being an activist... I hope he has the courage to never stop the fight," says Hendrickx of co-director Jeremy Kewuan.

Fantastique by Marjolijn Prins and produced by Serendiity Films won the Perfect Pitch Award while the 5-part series She They Us - Towards an Equal Future, directed by Zaïde Bil, Heleen Declercq and Sam Peeters and produced by Cassette for timescapes, won the Work in Progress Award. The total value of all the awards at CONNEXT 2023 came to approximately 80,000 euros.

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam unveiled the selections in its premiere-only sections Luminous and Frontlight, in addition to titles selected for the live cinema section IDFA on Stage and experimental art section Paradocs. IDFA will once again presents the Contagious & Queer program, curated by Simon(e) van Saarloos, and announces this year’s DocLab theme as Phenomenal Friction.

Sunny Side of the Doc announced October 10 its call for projects for the 4th edition of Global Pitch. The objective of the online event is to bring together the international documentary film community around engaged themes. In 2024 the focus will be on ‘Mapping the Future of our ecosystem and the documentary genre itself.’ 12 projects will be selected and presented February 6-7 2024. The deadline for submissions is November 24.

For its competition sections, the Poland-wide Millennium Docs Against Gravity invites films of over 45 minutes duration. The deadline for submissions is January 8, 2024. In 2023, MDAG presented more than 180 non-fiction films, garnering an audience of more than 140,000 spectators. The 21st edition will take place May 10-19 2024 in cinemas and May 21 - June 3 online.

Olga Lucovnicova updated the professional audience at Antwerp on her doc project about the personal journey she took to the Urals to investigate a tragic family secret - and how everything became overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “My film…is an urgent dialogue between the old and young generations between the past which disappears and the present which carries the scars and makes history repeat itself,” she said.