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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.

“This movie, for me, is not just a project. It has been part of my life,” said Soraya Akhalaghi at the beginning of a masterclass held at Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Warsaw, where she appeared alongside Iranian filmmaker Mehrdad Oskouei to discuss the making of A Fox Under a Pink Moon. The session, held on May 9 and titled “Remote Intimacy: Building Connection in a Distant Documentary,” focused on a seven-year creative process shaped by “distance, trust, danger and improvisation.”

Belarusian filmmaker Andrei Kutsila is currently in post-production on Letters (WT), a 90-minute documentary that portrays contemporary Belarus through the correspondences of people affected by political repression, imprisonment, exile and state violence. Produced by Mirosław Dembiński for Poland’s DocEdu Foundation, the film is a Poland-Germany-Lithuania co-production with inselfilm produktion and Moonmakers. BDE reports.

During the May 7 Opening Ceremony of the 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the feature documentary Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović was awarded the inaugural FIPRESCI Documentary Grand Prix, following a vote by members of the International Federation of Film Critics from around the world. The film has already received the European Film Award for Best European Documentary and was recognized at the Rotterdam festival, where it won both the Tiger Award in the Main Competition and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.

Polish filmmaker Łukasz Kowalski is developing Children of the Black Garden, a new feature documentary rooted in the toxic legacy of Silesia’s industrial past, and the hidden story of a doctor who exposed mass lead poisoning among children in the 1970s. Produced by Anna Mazerant and Kowalski himself through 4.30 Studio, the project is among the titles being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8.

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.

Polish helmers Sylwia Witowska and Piotr Wacowski are in mid-production on After Roll Call. Legio Patria Nostra, a feature documentary set inside a French Foreign Legion veterans’ home in Puyloubier, in the south of France. “This is not a film about war,” the filmmakers underline. “It is about what happens to a person when the system that shaped them no longer exists.”

In No Mother’s Land, pitching May 8 in Warsaw, director Wiktoria Davis Szymańska recounts her gripping decade-long ordeal to protect her daughter, all the time trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare. For Szymańska, the pitch also marks a decisive step in bringing to the screen a story she began filming long before it could be safely told. BDE reports.

The 22nd edition of the Docu Talents from the East – a presentation of the most remarkable new documentary projects from Central and Eastern Europe – will take place August 16 during the Cinelink Industry Days at Sarajevo FF. “The Docu Talents has proven to be an event that effectively interconnects documentary film professionals with festival selectors and producers. Each year we see very tangible results both for the careers of the selected filmmakers and for their films,” adds Jarmila Outratová, head of Ji.hlava IDFF Industry. The deadline for submissions is May 31.

The ARTE European Talent Development Award is part of “a strategic alliance that strengthens the role of the professional market as a key space for promoting new documentary projects in the context of increasing complexity in sector financing,” the festival writes. The ARTE professional prize joins others offered by the of Al Jazeera Documentary and 3Cat. Total prize money at DocsBarcelona Pro this year exceeds €66,000, of which €52,500 is in cash.