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“It's a film about someone who turned tragedy into a driving force,” Polish director Dorota Roś told the professional audience during her pitch for the feature documentary Diary of Experiences, produced by Telemark. It is a film that details a man’s determination to speak again, through AI, after losing his voice to larynx cancer. For Konrad, the quest is not just about restoring speech, it’s also about reclaiming intimacy, belonging and identity.

Siblings Mohamed Jabaly, Rima Jabaly and Ibrahim Jabaly made a highly emotional presentation of their feature doc project My Sister Gaza during the Public Pitch session of DocsBarcelona. In the film, as bombs fall over Gaza, Rima and Ibrahim find in filmmaking a way to document their family’s displacement, capturing months of struggle to survive and the shattering of lives. Meanwhile a desperately worried Mohamed, in exile in Norway, stays in daily contact. The project is described as “a raw, intimate story of war, love, resilience, and the unbreakable bonds of family.”

Before the Fire follows a Mapuche community in southern Argentina defending their ancestral land and traditions. Their daily life is shattered when hired killers murder one of their members, igniting a struggle for memory and justice. “Crafting a narrative in which a people such as the Mapuche recount their struggle to ‘be’ and, at the same time, to ‘reclaim’ their territory, is not only relevant to Argentina but also to a concept of ‘community’ that is becoming increasingly urgent in the world we inhabit,” says German co-producer Natalia Imaz of parabellum film.

“Invisible Traces aims not only to shift the perception of ala kachuu (bride kidnapping) from a normalized ‘tradition’ to a recognized form of gender-based violence, but also to validate the lived experience of those affected,” renowned docmaker Nurzhamal Karamoldoeva tells BDE of her new feature project. When a theatre performance about bride kidnapping comes to a Kyrgyz village, 78-year-old Asylkan, abducted at 18, steps into the performance and changes its course…

Set within the ancient Hyrcanian forests of northern Iran, the film follows an elderly herding couple who may be among the last practitioners of a traditional form of cattle herding in this region. “What makes the project unique is its intimate, long-term access to the characters over multiple years and seasons, combined with a purely observational approach,” director Yaser Talebi tells BDE. “Rather than constructing conflict externally, the film allows time, landscape, and daily labor to reveal a quiet but profound tension between staying and leaving, continuity and rupture.”

Swiss producer Gaspard Vignon talks to Business Doc Europe about his doc that details attempts in Switzerland to reintegrate wolves into the countryside. “The wolf’s return carries a strong and polarised political debate in a lot of European countries, especially the alpine countries,” he says. “Inhabiting the Night is clearly a political manifesto and has an impact dimension, but not by addressing this debate directly. The question isn’t ‘pro or anti the wolf,’ but ‘how do we coexist, how do we share a common space?’”

Uruguayan Agustín Flores’ highly personal documentary interweaves the story of Jorge Firpo, a legendary horse trainer, with the director’s own journey through the pain of his father’s suicide. “Leaving the track is inevitable — it will happen to all of us,” Flores tells BDE. “The question is: how do we make life worth living before that moment arrives? Because a life without passion is a life without meaning.”

Ireland/UK’s Mike Downey and Istanbul-based Emir Kuelal Haznevi, both executive producers on Cannes competition 2026 entries Parallel Tales (Asghar Farhadi) and All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), have joined forces to form the new boutique film financing outfit Saudade Ink to develop, produce and invest in quality arthouse fiction and documentary cinema from across the world.

dok.incubator is looking for film projects from Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, as well as co-productions with these countries, to join the 2026 workshop. The renewed edition brings “an expanded two-part workshop format, more international tutors, direct feedback from decision makers, and a stronger focus on marketing, audience building, and smart distribution strategies,“ organisers underline.

More than 4500 industry professionals and creatives, among them Juliette Binoche, Joachim Trier, Ruben Östlund, Sandra Hüller and Francis Ford Coppolla, have signed an open letter calling for safeguards to film and audiovisual funding following the proposal to merge the MEDIA strand of the Creative Europe programme into the new AgoraEU mega-programme. “We, European cinema professionals and citizens – all cinema lovers – call upon the European Commission, European Parliament and Member States to future-proof the success and integrity of the vital and precious MEDIA programme and reinforce its resources,” the letter demands.