The 22nd edition of the DOK Co-Pro Market welcomes 35 projects from across 34 countries looking to connect with new international financing and co-production partners.
“The DOK Co-Pro Market continues to draw sustained interest from filmmakers, with a record number of animated documentary and animation entries,” the festival writes. What’s more, this year’s selection sees a wide geographic spread, spanning all continents and featuring countries typically less represented in the international film arena, including the DR Congo, Namibia, Palestine, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. Women filmmakers also maintain a strong presence in the line-up, comprising 50 percent.
“As the world wrestles with deepening crises, the selected projects reaffirm film as a vital political art form,” the festival adds. Among the prominent themes shaping the line-up are reckonings with (colonial) pasts, struggles for bodily autonomy under hostile states, Indigenous resistance, and socio-political upheavals. Personal storytelling, including first-person accounts mining family archives and memory, remains “an essential mode for many filmmakers to probe broader historical narratives.”
Across the selection, several projects examine the enduring control exerted over women’s bodies. “Weaving archival footage, first-person testimony, and 2D animation in I Am Every Woman, the director duo of Ruxandra Gubernat and Maria Stanisheva, born in Romania and Bulgaria under communist regimes, map their experiences of reproductive oppression and the new mechanisms governing women’s bodies today.
The recurring fates of women are also at the centre of Ruben Mayoko and Junior Mozese’s Abeti, following an eponymous heroine in Kinshasa as she grapples with predicaments shared across her family, from single motherhood to sex work.
Meanwhile, Juyeon Yang’s Neither Shadow nor Light confronts “a fossilised past” of sexual violence of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising as an incisive, ongoing question in a lawsuit.
Rather than following migrant journeys, a number of projects “explore displacement through something closer to home: the infrastructures and spaces that shape our daily lives, such as shopping centres, factories, and classrooms.” Syrian filmmaker Rami Farah’s A1 (prod. Signe Byrge Sørensen/Final Cut For Real) transports the viewer to a Paris classroom of refugees, reflecting on the difficulty of learning French as a consequence of exile.
Max Kerkhoff’s Snails plucks the viewer into Chile’s dazzling spiral-shaped shopping centres – “caracoles” or “snails”, opened during the 1970s/1980s neoliberal boom – which are now inhabited by people left behind by the globalised economy. In Shorena Tevzadze’s Concrete Grassland, a couple in Tbilisi is driven into a different kind of exile, by their country’s neglect, with the family stuck in limbo, waiting for their unfinished flat, while Georgia moves through cycles of unrest, protests, and war.
Themes of land dispossession and Indigenous resistance resonate across several projects. Chronicling the efforts of three Mapuche siblings in southern Chile, Loreto Plubins’ Folil highlights the persistence of their fight to safeguard their ancestral land, carrying on their parents’ struggle against the state and corporations from the 1940s.
In thde US, Lea Schlude and Matthew Teutimez’s Hazy Valley “challenges narratives imposed on another land, now known as Los Angeles, and built on the unceded territory of the Kizh and other peoples.” Meanwhile, Abdel Mandili’s The Birds Still Sing Here interrogates the silence pervading history on the island of Lovongai in Papua New Guinea, where 12 Indigenous clans were drawn into a civil war over land disputes, fuelled by foreign extractive mining and logging.
This year’s crop features a diversity of forms, the festival adds, ranging from hybrid works that use magical realism(Jumana Manna’s Jerusalem Boys), to dual-timeline narratives (Almira Saifullina’s Dala), to investigative projects that examine today’s political realities and legacies through a searching lens (Chiara Sambuchi’s Kim).
The selection includes animated documentary projects, some of which use animation to depict interiority and trauma typically inaccessible to live-action footage (Joel Kachi Benson’s The Road to Bama, Claudia Tosi’s The Spectres of the Camp), as well as the feature animation, new in 2026 (Gao Yuan’s Cloud of the Unknown).
Also present in the line-up are archival projects that engage with sourced archives, such as Lucas Weglinski’s Hunting Season, Yaela Gottlieb’s Je Vous Salue, Peru, and Brina Klampfer Merčnik and Miha Možina’s Paloma, the Lonely Bird, among others.
The 22nd edition welcomes back directors and producers with strong ties to DOK Leipzig. BAFTA-nominated producer Sonja Henrici returns with Maryam Haddadi’s The Enemy, Ada Solomon presents Paula Onet’s Unbalanced (WT) and Jia Zhao joins the DOK Co-Pro Market with Sean Ali Wang’s Pratopia (Muyi Film, co-prod. Heino Deckert/Ma.ja.de.).
The DOK Co-Pro Market 2026 is set to take place from 26 October to 27 October in Leipzig, with complementary online meetings on 3 November. This year, a total of seven awards will be presented at the DOK Co-Pro Market, including two new awards: the Verità Films Award for Best Project and the GRAP Archive Award.
This year’s selection process was carried out by Sébastien Onomo (producer and CEO, Special Touch Studios and Pathé Touch Afrique), Guevara Namer (documentary filmmaker and visual artist), and Natalie Campbell-Reid (Acquisitions and Business Development Executive, Together Films). It was supported by Brigid O’Shea (co-head of studies at CIRCLE and director of DAE), Giacomo Nudi (producer, Les Films Cosmos), Camille Blumert (DOK Co-Pro Market & Short n’ Sweet assistant), Babette Dieu (DOK Co-Pro Market coordinator), and Nadja Tennstedt (director of DOK Industry).
Find out more about the 2026 DOK Co-Pro Market projects on the website.
The 35 Selected Projects at the DOK Co-Pro Market 2026:
- A1 | Rami Farah | France, Denmark | Hauteville Productions, Les Films Grain De Sable, Final Cut for Real
- Abeti | Ruben Mayoko, Junior Mozese | DR Congo, France, South Africa | Zero Attitude Flix, Solent Production, CTRL ALT Shift
- Anatomy of Agency | Patrick Sam, Yasmin C. Rams | Germany, Namibia | Perennial Lens, Joe Vision
- Arakan Monsoon | Maung Sun | France, Myanmar | Panorama films, Massala Production, MS films
- The Birds Still Sing Here | Abdel Mandili | Netherlands | The Waves
- The Child We Share | Yeonah Paik | South Korea | Studio YONN
- Cloud of the Unknown | Gao Yuan | France, Hong Kong | Chinese Shadows, Slowsword Limited, Shasha & Co Production
- Concrete Grassland | Shorena Tevzadze | Georgia, France | Parachute Films, DiaFilm, Ceresa Films
- Dala | Almira Saifullina | Kazakhstan, Sweden | Algiz, EuroArctic Media Group AB
- The Enemy | Maryam Haddadi | UK, Netherlands | Sonja Henrici Creates, Mudland Studio
- Evening School | Pylyp Dotsenko | Ukraine | Phalanstery Films
- Fallout | Isaac Knights-Washbourn | UK, Japan | Varda Pictures, ARTicle Films
- La Flaca | Alejandro Valbuena | Colombia, Canada | Curare Films, Kasa Créative
- Folil | Loreto Plubins | Chile | La Ventana Cine
- The Gap | Paweł Ferdek | Poland | Marchello Production, Inbornmedia
- Hazy Valley | Lea Schlude, Matthew Teutimez | Germany | Lapislazuli Film
- Hunting Season | Lucas Weglinski | Brazil, Germany | 70 Steps, Agalma Filmes, Loma Filmes
- I Am Every Woman | Ruxandra Gubernat, Maria Stanisheva | Bulgaria, Romania, France | ANIMADOCS, Armadillo Entertainment, Anna Films
- Je Vous Salue, Peru | Yaela Gottlieb | Peru | Walden Films
- Jerusalem Boys | Jumana Manna | Germany, Norway, Palestine | SEERA Films
- Kim | Chiara Sambuchi | Germany | inselfilm
- Kunchok and His Many Moons | Ashok Meena | India | Jal Damru Madhya, Studio Ainak, Soul of Desert
- Let Us Fight | Eli Maene | Congo | Uhuru Films Company
- Neither Shadow nor Light | Juyeon Yang | South Korea | Keumyoil Film
- Paloma, the Lonely Bird | Brina Klampfer Merčnik, Miha Možina | Slovenia | Vertigo
- Pegasus | Sally Jacobson, Tuva Björk | Sweden | Bank Film
- The Pitch is Greener | Roni Schlesinger, Maayan Belech | Israel | KM Productions
- Pratopia | Sean Ali Wang | Netherlands, Germany | Muyi Film, Ma.ja.de.
- The Road to Bama | Joel Kachi Benson | Nigeria, USA, Poland | Bama Holding, BluBlu Studios, JB Multimedia
- Seawomen | Sopho Chkheidze | Georgia | Sakdoc Film
- Snails | Max Kerkhoff | Chile, Germany | CangrejoFilms, Mayana Films
- The Spectres of the Camp | Claudia Tosi | Italy | La Scontrosa
- Two of Us | Jūratė Samulionytė | Lithuania | Just a moment
- Unbalanced (WT) | Paula Onet | Romania, France | microFILM, Darjeeling
- Who We Are | Sophie Ataya | Germany | SEERA Films
