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Finnish producer Pasi Hakkio (Wacky Tie) and director Joel Karppanen pitched the feature debut Labour Day, about the lives of food couriers operating within many of the world’s capitals. “We’re often told not to bite the hand that feeds us. But in the era of tech oligarchy, we feed the hand! Withdrawing from platforms isn’t an act of defiance against a benevolent provider — it’s reclaiming what was always ours,” says the director.

“This film is stitched to my heart and soul. There is blood in it – family - and roots that go back decades, tangled with the lives of the communities who welcomed us not as filmmakers, but as kin,” director Alejandro Valbuena (Curare Films, Canada/Columbia) tells BDE ahead of his rough-cut presentation of The Wind’s Thirst at DocsBarcelona Industry.

Homesick explores the personal journey of a Korean adoptee raised in a troubled Danish household. Tanja Inwol deploys visuals, imagination and considering writing skills to revisit her memories and peel back the intricate layers of transnational adoption. “Tanja and I have worked closely together since the beginning of her career, and our long-standing creative collaboration is one of the project’s key strengths,” producer Rikke Tambo Andersen tells BDE.

“Perhaps it was a final journey. A desire to remember the bond and love between a father and a son, just as despair was beginning to take hold,” producer Carlo Alpeggiani suggests the motivation behind Giacomo Boeri’s new film, about his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. That said, it is his father’s quirky approach to life that helps the director tell the story of Alzheimer’s from both sides, Alpeggiani adds to BDE.

If documentaries at Cannes sail on a sea of fiction, then Pierre-Alexis Chevit’s Cannes Docs sidebar represents something of a safe harbour for all doccers, be they filmmakers, producers, sellers or docfests. Cannes Docs is furthermore a place with a clear and proud identity, Chevit tells BDE. “It is a strategic place of community gathering for all of us doc-believers, to stand our ground in Cannes and affirm, loud and clear, that docs are cinema. Period.”

Hot on the heels of its Impact Days and Movies That Matter pitches (March), the First Hand films-produced Kalari Kid tells of the eponymous Indian martial art that is taking on greater significance for women within a society where gender-based violence is commonplace. “Raising awareness is essential to spreading the clear message of zero tolerance for all forms of violence against women and girls,” First Hand Films’ Daniel Schneider tells BDE.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that film festival masterclasses are delivered in hushed, reverential tones to an ostensibly mute and seated audience. Not when Northern Irish filmmaker/academic/doc maverick Mark Cousins comes to town. This week he was in Warsaw to engage head-to-head with MDAG Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk and, in the process, deliver what he called his “anti-masterclass.”

On May 11, the awards of Millennium Docs Against Gravity Industry programme were handed out. This year’s event featured 4 pitching sessions, 42 projects and over 340 one-on-one meetings. “We’re proud to support these outstanding projects at every stage of their journey. With such bold voices and powerful stories, we truly believe the films developed here will resonate with audiences around the world,” said Anna Szczypińska, Head of MDAG Industry.

Kompleta is an intimate record of an extremely difficult period in the lives of the directors Tomasz Śliwiński and Magdalena Hueckel. Magdalena, while 8 months pregnant, was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. In the film, which world-premiered May 10 and pitched at the Pole Position event in Warsaw, the directors combine raw documentary footage with elements of music video, photography and collage in an experimental attempt to process their trauma through art.

Nava Mama, by Romanian Ana Vîjdea, tells of her return to the village – the mothership of the title – where she grew up, in order to break the cycle of violence that she experienced throughout her childhood. “It was a violence that seemed so pervasive that my grandmother used to cry herself to sleep. She woke up crying and I was crying alongside her without really understanding why,” she told the professional audience in Warsaw.