Ji.hlava IDFF unveiled August 11 the seven new major projects from Central and Eastern Europe that comprise Docu Talents from the East 2026. The projects, currently in post-production with premieres expected between September 2026 and August 2027, will be presented August 16, and the most promising will be awarded by an international jury and announced during a prize ceremony on August 17 at the Festival Garden.
“Since 2005, Docu Talents has been a key industry event attended by festival advisors, distributors, buyers, and international journalists, showcasing some of the most remarkable documentary projects from the region,” organisers write.
DOCU TALENTS FROM THE EAST 2026
- 40 MARIA LUISA BOULEVARD (Bulgaria). Director and producer: Kristina Spassovska. Synopsis: A filmmaker returns to her family’s decaying apartment on Sofia’s historic central boulevard to rehearse a film that remains perpetually unfinished. The film begins with a simple observation — relatives, crew members, actors, and animals gather in the apartment to rehearse a film about a man who continues to inhabit his home after death. Drifting between daily routines, they recreate memories, stories and traces of past lives in the apartment. As the film preparation unfolds, documentary observation and imagination intertwine, revealing a portrait of a home and a family confronting loss and change.
- BERNADSKY GARDEN (Ukraine) Director: Bohdan Prykhodko. Producer: Eva Zurian. Synopsis: Bernadsky Garden is an observational documentary essay set in Kramatorsk, a city fifteen kilometres from the frontline. Over the course of changing seasons, the film follows a public garden that remains a space of care, beauty, and routine amid the gradual approach of war. The garden and its municipal workers become a portrait of a community trying to preserve normality while living under the constant threat of evacuation and destruction. The film contains no interviews and never leaves the garden. War is present only through sounds, traces, and absences. As the seasons change, so does the garden, revealing a fragile world struggling to hold on to life even as its future becomes increasingly uncertain.
- HOTSPOT. A DOCUTHERAPY (HOTSPOT. DOKUTERAPIA, Poland) Director: Michał Bielawski. Producer: Maciej Kubicki. Synopsis: “We are the climate crisis. We’re living in it. This is what shapes us,” says Zbyszek while opening a therapeutic process that takes place in Lower Silesia over the course of several months during which we observe individual protagonists and find out what subjects they bring to the meetings. Michał Bielawski’s film is a documentary about the mutual relationship between humans and nature. It follows people grappling with their emotions, each marked differently by the climate crisis, intercut with sequences observing the impact humans have on the natural world. This distinctive, innovative mode of storytelling and layered structure are central to Bielawski’s cinematic language, seen for instance in the internationally acclaimed The Wind . A Documentary Thriller.
- LOVE EXPOSED (Czech Republic, Slovakia) Director: Filip Remunda. Producers: Filip Remunda, Tereza Horská, Vít Klusák. Synopsis: Blanka, a mother of three, attempts to reconnect with her dominant father, a playful macho and internationally acclaimed nude photographer whose work was published by Taschen under the curation of Dian Hanson. In exchange for spending time together, she promises to revive interest in the raw, visceral images he created in response to the freedom that followed the fall of communism. But contemporary curators dismiss his work as outdated, and she finds him isolated in a remote forest studio. Their bittersweet journey, filled with absurd humour and family conflict, pushes Blanka to physical collapse. Guided by an eccentric hypnotist, she gains the perspective and strength to outgrow the role of a wounded child and break the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
- ORA ET LABORA / working title (Luxembourg, Slovakia) Director: Dzhovani Gospodinov. Producers: Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu. Synopsis: Ora et Labora is a cinematic meditation on monastic life in the twenty-first century, set at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Mauritius in Tholey, Saarland, the oldest monastery on German soil. The film enters the abbey in 2023 under the leadership of Abbot Mauritius, a former Michelin-starred chef whose ambitious and unconventional vision transformed the monastery and gave the community a renewed sense of purpose. As the abbey seeks to revitalise itself and attract a new generation of monks, this fragile process is disrupted by the sudden death of its talismanic abbot. Through multiple characters Ora et Labora explores contrasting relationships to faith, authority, doubt, and vocation and asks what spirituality and belonging can mean in the context of religion and contemporary society.
- ORBÁN AND ME (Hungary, Canada) Director: Réka Pigniczky. Producer: Julianna Ugrin. Synopsis: Orbán and Me is an intimate political documentary set against Hungary’s pivotal 2026 elections after more than sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule. Director Réka Pigniczky, a Hungarian-American journalist who once interviewed Orbán, seeks to understand his transformation from democratic reformer to increasingly inaccessible leader. Through her attempts to interview him, and through debates within her own family, the film explores democracy’s fragility, political polarisation, and whether democratic renewal remains possible in Hungary today.
- RETUNING / working title (Slovakia) Director: Sára Prokopová. Producer: Tereza Tokárová. Synopsis: In 2024, a new political power in Slovakia triggers radical shifts to bring independent public media under control. Amidst deep uncertainty and growing censorship concerns, a strike committee forms within the institution. The camera witnesses hallway micro-worlds and the resistance of journalists who, overnight, are forced to defend their profession. This Quixotic struggle against the machinery of power shows how ordinary people standing up for shared values maintain their own integrity.
