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CPH:DOX’s international financing and co-production event CPH:FORUM is now open for submissions, accepting projects until November 1, 2024. This includes the new CPH:RoughCut, which will present 5 projects at rough cut stage looking for distributors (including theatrical), sales agents, buyers, high profile festival premieres and other forms of exhibition.

Dokumentale (10-20 October) is described as “a festival for documentary formats dedicated to the promotion of film, new media, non-fiction and podcasts.” The new festival provides a forum for exchange between filmmakers, journalists, authors, artists, academics and the public and will take place annually in Berlin. The festival also offers an extensive professional programme in the form of D'Hub, which takes place from 14 to 16 October.

The Cinéma du réel Competition comprises up to twenty international and up to twenty French documentary films of all durations. The 47th edition of the Paris-based festival runs March 22-29 2025. Other sections are the special screenings and Popular Front(s) programme, while the Première Fenêtre selection gathers documentary debuts from young creators.

Visions du Réel has put out the call for non-fiction films and projects for the next edition of the festival running 4-13 April 2025 in Nyon, Switzerland. The film call covers four competition sections and four non-competitive sections, while VdR Industry (April 6-9 2025) requests submissions for early pitches and works-in-progress, plus two development labs.

The 67th edition of DOK Leipzig will pay homage to the two esteemed women filmmakers, French director Dominique Cabrera and Spanish animation artist Isabel Herguera. The festival will also honour the memory of late German director and writer Thomas Heise with a lineup of films, an evening event, and this year’s DEFA Matinee.

The team behind the Ukrainian documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth organised an artistic action September 4 at Venice to draw attention to the plight of Ukrainian prisoners of war. On the red carpet, members of the team wore clothing embroidered with the distances from the Lido to various locations where Russians are holding the POWs.

The FIFDH Impact Days professional programme helps independent filmmakers from around the globe to amplify the impact of their work. Year after year, the event facilitates alliances between filmmakers and key players within the vast ecosystem of organisations, policymakers and funders active around Geneva - and beyond. The submissions deadline is 4 October (midnight CET). The next edition of FIFDH Impact Days runs 9-12 March 2025.

The event will include 29 new projects in Main Pitch, Rough Cut, Balkan Stars and Special Selection sections. “This edition will emphasize documentaries that tell human stories, address pressing social issues, and promote universal values, with a focus on the regions under-represented in the documentary filmmaking industry,” say organisers of the event which takes place September 14-16 during the Al Jazeera Balkans Doc FF in Sarajevo.

The film has picked up a number of high-profile wins including the Panorama Audience Award and Documentary Award at Berlinale 2024, as well as the Tim Hetherington Award at the 2024 Sheffield Documentary Festival. It was recently selected as one of 12 feature documentaries for the upcoming European Film Awards (EFAs) and will soon play at the 2024 Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals.

Directed by award-winning Serbian Mladen Kovačević and produced together with Iva Plemić Divjak, the film will have its world premiere at Giornate Degli Autori on September 3. In the film, drawn to a paradise island in the quest for happiness, the protagonists grapple with the endless tensions between life's possibilities, but the question remains if they are living the life they should be living.