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After his debut Four Journeys, the opening film of IDFA 2021, Chinese filmmaker Louis Hothothot again turned his camera inward, his focus once more on his family following the death of his father in 2022. “The central question was how to take care of my mother who is weak, and how to collaborate with my sister who has had a bad relationship with me for a long time,” Hothothot described the work-in-progress to the professional audience in Utrecht. “And underneath, it is about the bigger picture about the women's condition in China.”

MIA returns to Rome from 19 to 23 October with a new market layout that “transforms historic Via Veneto and Piazza Barberini into a district dedicated to the international film and audiovisual industry, fostering encounters between creativity, industry, finance and innovation,” MIA writes. Doc projects are in the frame at the Co-pro Market and the Italians Doc It Better pitch event, while doc-related issues will be discussed and analyzed during the MIA Conference.

“Kabul, Year Zero is the final film in Aboozar Amini’s Kabul trilogy, following Kabul, City in the Wind and Kabul, Between Prayers. But this time, the perspective shifts radically. The story of Kabul and its wars is told through children,” Chinese-Dutch film producer Jia Zhao (Silk Road Films) tells BDE in Utrecht during the second edition of the Dutch project showcase NLWave. “Their voices form a kind of collective chant - not a political shout - about growing up amid repeated cycles of war.”

“Sketches that were never meant to appear in a film form the backdrop for texts written a hundred years ago by the Dutch writer Nescio,” producer Paul Ruven (Talent United) describes to BDE the new project by the maverick Dutch pairing of Eugenie Jansen and Albert Elings. “By bringing Nescio’s themes into dialogue with contemporary lives and landscapes, they’ve created a film that is both reflective and immediate: a cinematic essay about shifting realities, generational change and the fragile things that still offer us orientation.”

Menno Otten’s latest feature documentary was inspired by a psychosis he observed in his brother, and the sense of calm the man derived from obsessively watching people from his window, finding solace in their seemingly serene gazes. In Still City, Amsterdam is revealed through the gestures of its residents, using 125 years of archival film. “As a city symphony, the film explores our longing for stillness amid the chaos of life,” says director Otten, “revealing what lies behind these moments of quiet and the shared humanity that connects us.”

After losing irreplaceable moments on a hard disk, filmmaker Robert-Jonathan Koeyers returns with his family to the locations they visited to fill in the gaps, all the time recording the process. The film is produced by Richard Valk of Valk Productions. “We are out to make an eclectic, kaleidoscopic film that positions itself as a documentary, an essay film, a fictitious reconstruction of memories, and with several animations to serve as the glue keeping it all together,” Valk tells BDE.

“Since the full-scale invasion, I have experienced what it’s like when a language becomes contaminated,” says Dutch director Aliona van der Horst of her new film, about a bi-lingual Ukrainian couple living in exile in Berlin, and the strain placed on their 45-year marriage. “Russian has become the language of the former coloniser of Ukraine: the language of Putin, the perpetrators, the murderers.”

Is there a more famous Dutch export than Vincent van Gogh? The Impressionist painter and his masterworks were ignored during his short, feverish life, and he died in total obscurity. Which is where he may have remained, had his visionary sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger not recognised his genius, and vowed to proclaim it to the world. BDE canvasses Dutch production company 100%’s Sandra Bolz about the new feature doc which tells Johanna’s hitherto untold story.

Indonesia-based Dutch actor Hans de Kraker has long been the go-to face of white colonial villainy in Indonesian films. But when he receives a suitcase of old family belongings from his sister, Hans uncovers a highly unnerving truth - his late father had committed terrible atrocities during his service in Indonesia. “In its own unique and highly visual way, Penjajah fits seamlessly into the current decolonisation debate by revealing different perspectives on a controversial chapter in European history,” Esther van Driesum of Dutch production company BIND tells BDE.

After their 2022 Berlinale Documentary Award-winning Myanmar Diaries, the Myanmar Film Collective returns with their hybrid work What Happened to My Country, What Happened to Me? With most members of the Collective now living in exile in Germany, Sweden and Thailand, the film is both a testimony of Myanmar’s continuing tragedy and an imaginative reflection on loss, displacement and the enduring search for home. “This is cinematic storytelling, patiently and carefully framed cinema,” producer Corinne van Egeraat (ZINDOC) and DOP/Editor Petr Lom tell BDE.