40 MARIA LUISA BOULEVARD

BERNADSKY GARDEN
(Сад Бернацького)

RETUNING / working title
(PRELADENIE)

ORBAN AND ME

LOVE EXPOSED
(EXPOZICE LÁSKOU)

ORA ET LABORA / working title

HOTSPOT. A DOCUTHERAPY
(HOTSPOT. DOKUTERAPIA)

40 MARIA LUISA BOULEVARD

Country: Bulgaria
Film length: 70 min
Director: Kristina Spassovska
Producer: Kristina Spassovska
Associate Producer: Yordan Radichkov
DoP: Kiril Prodanov
Estimated date of premiere: August 2027

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.

Director’s biography: Kristina Spassovska is a Bulgarian writer-director born in Geneva in 1990. She graduated from studies in film directing from EICAR Paris. Her latest short film, The Reptiles (2024), premiered at the La Rochelle Cinema Festival in France and won the National Award for Best Bulgarian Short Film. Spassovska is an alum of Talents Sarajevo 2022, European Short Pitch 2021/2022, and First Films First 2022/2023, and a recipient of the Transilvania International Film Festival Development Award 2022. She is currently developing her debut fiction feature, Reptiles, at the LIM | Less Is More 2026 programme, organised by Le Groupe Ouest in France.

Production company: Bellevue Kino
33 Strandzha St., 1303 Sofia, Bulgaria
vimeo.com
kspasovska@gmail.com

Bellevue Kino is an independent production company based in Sofia, Bulgaria, dedicated to fiction, documentary and hybrid audiovisual forms. Bellevue Kino's projects have received support from the Bulgarian National Film Center, Sofia Municipality, the French Institute, the Goethe-Institut and international co-production partners. Its films have been screened and have received awards at festivals across Europe.

BERNADSKY GARDEN (Сад Бернацького)

Country: Ukraine
Film length: 30 min
Director: Bohdan Prykhodko
Producer: Eva Zurian
DoP: Yaroslav Pushkarchuk
Estimated date of premiere: March 2027

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.

Director’s biography: Bohdan Prykhodko is a Ukrainian documentary filmmaker from the Donetsk region. He graduated from the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University, where he studied documentary film directing. He has directed three short documentary films, two video art projects, and several commercial, social, and theatre productions. Alongside filmmaking, he organises cultural and ethnographic initiatives in Eastern Ukraine.

Production company: IMA Bolero
1V Hetmana Street, 03057 Kyiv, Ukraine
bolero.kiev.ua
order@audioreklama.com.ua

Bolero is a Ukrainian media company with over twenty years of experience in audio production, content creation, and multimedia technologies. As one of the pioneers of the Ukrainian indoor media market, the company operates a nationwide network serving more than 600 locations. Alongside its commercial activities, Bolero supports independent audiovisual projects and documentary filmmaking through its production division.

RETUNING / working title (PRELADENIE)

Country: Slovakia
Film length: 70 min
Director: Sára Prokopová
Producer: Tereza Tokárová
DoP: Sára Prokopová
Estimated date of premiere: October–November 2026

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.

Director’s biography: Sára Prokopová is a Slovak documentary filmmaker and a graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Her work explores diverse themes, with a deep focus on how environments shape human identity. Alongside directing, she is active as a researcher and assistant director. Her collaborative credits include working with director Peter Kerekes (on Marathon Stories and MMM film), as well as the production company Marina Films. She is currently putting the finishing touches on her upcoming film, Retuning (2026).

Production company: CinePunkt s.r.o
Trieda SNP 61, 040 11 Košice, Slovakia
www.cinepoint.cz
cinepunkt@gmail.com

cinepunkt is an independent production company based in Slovakia, founded in 2021 by producer Tereza Tokarová to create a space for new voices and unique stories. Its films have been shown at festivals such as DOCLisboa, BELDOCS, Ji.hlava, FIPADOC and Festival dei Popoli, and presented at international workshops (Ex Oriente, DOK.incubator, European Short Pitch) and markets (East Doc Platform, IDFA Project Showcase, DocsBarcelona).

ORBAN AND ME

Countries: Hungary, Canada
Film length: 90 min
Director: Réka Pigniczky
Producer: Julianna Ugrin
Co-producers: Barnabas Gerő, Hanka Kastelicova, Eva Rybkova
DoP: Gergő Kiss
Estimated date of premiere: First half of 2027

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.

Director’s biography: Réka Pigniczky is an American-Hungarian filmmaker and a co-founder of 56Films. She was politically active in Hungary in the early 1990s and later worked as a journalist covering Hungary for the Associated Press. Her films explore memory, identity, belonging, and emigration, often through the legacy of the Revolution of 1956. Her award-winning debut documentary, Journey Home, weaves personal history with national reckoning (2006) in a style similar to Orbán and Me. She holds an MA in iInternational relations from Columbia University and is on the board of the Hungarian Documentary Association.

Production company: 56Films
Garas utca 5-I em. 2, 1026 Budapest, Hungary
www.56films.hu
info@56films.hu

56Films was founded in 2005 by documentary filmmaker Réka Pigniczky and producer Barnabás Gerő. Based in Budapest, 56Films has produced a number of award-winning feature-length documentaries as well as short films. 56Films is also a production partner in the award-winning visual history archive Memory Project, founded in 2015.

LOVE EXPOSED (EXPOZICE LÁSKOU)

Countries: Czech Republic, Slovakia
Film length: 95 min
Director: Filip Remunda
Producers: Filip Remunda, Tereza Horská, Vít Klusák
Co-producers: Peter Kerekes, Hanka Kastelicová, Tereza Bóna Keilová, Saša Dlouhý
DoP: Jakub Halousek
Estimated date of premiere: Autumn 2026

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.

Director’s biography: Filip Remunda graduated from studies in documentary directing from FAMU. He gained international recognition with Czech Dream (2004), co-directed with Vít Klusák. His films include Village B, which won an award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival; Steam on the River, winner of the Slovak Film Academy Award; and Chickens, Virus and Us, the recipient of several environmental awards. He is a co-founder of the Institute of Documentary Film and Hypermarket Film and one of the main authors of the TV documentary series Czech Journal.

Production company: Hypermarket Film
Křemencova 178/10, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic
www.hypermarketfilm.cz
email@hypermarketfilm.cz

HYPERMARKET FILM is an independent documentary production company founded in Prague in 2003. For over two decades, it has established itself as one of the leading producers of creative documentaries in the Czech Republic and Central Europe, with international reach and social impact. It mainly produces feature-length documentary films and TV documentary series.

ORA ET LABORA / working title

Countries: Luxembourg, Slovakia
Film length: 90 min
Director: Dzhovani Gospodinov
Producer: Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu
Creative Producer: Luise Heiderhoff
Co-producer: Sen Film
DoP: Chris Poulles
Estimated date of premiere: Beginning of 2027

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.

Director’s biography: Dzhovani Gospodinov is a Luxembourgish-Bulgarian filmmaker whose work experiments with the boundaries between documentary and fiction. He is interested in the power of observational filmmaking and its ability to conjure both exteriorised and reflexive modes of storytelling. His films are defined by a materialist ethics that takes real-life encounters as a point of departure for further ontological inquiry. Gospodinov’s projects have illustrated the poetics of ancient pagan rituals and the erosion of intimacies between humankind and the natural world, among other themes.

Production company: AMOUR FOU Luxembourg
49-51, Rue de Warken, L-9088 Ettelbruck, Luxembourg
www.amourfoufilm.com
luxembourg@amourfoufilm.com

AMOUR FOU was founded in Luxembourg in 1995, in Vienna in 2001 and in Germany in 2023. It creates artistically exceptional feature, documentary and short films. Throughout the process, AMOUR FOU stands for vision and for pushing the envelope, whether in terms of aesthetics, production or distribution strategies. The focus is on European independent auteur cinema and the distinctive "handwriting" of the directors who work with AMOUR FOU.

HOTSPOT. A DOCUTHERAPY (HOTSPOT. DOKUTERAPIA)

Country: Poland
Film length: 80 min
Director: Michał Bielawski
Producer: Maciej Kubicki
Associate Producer: Ola Dur
Co-producers: Wrocław Feature Film Studio, Polish Film Institute, MX35
DoP: Michał Gruszczyński
Estimated date of premiere: April 2027

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.

Director’s biography: Michał Bielawski is an award-winning Polish documentary filmmaker and recipient of scholarships from the Polish Ministry of Culture, the City of Warsaw, and the Goethe-Institut. His feature debut, Mundial: The Highest Stakes, won several awards. He later directed 1989 and The Wind. A Documentary Thriller, which premiered at Visions du Réel and received an Eagle nomination. His recent films include the series 1992: The Great Game and Passenger Andrzej Munk. Since 2019, he has been a member of the Polish Film Academy, the Polish Filmmakers Association, and the Polish Documentary Directors Guild.

Production company: Telemark
Ordynacka 14/9, 05-077 Waszawa, Poland
www.telemark.com.pl
maciej.kubicki@telemark.com.pl

TELEMARK is a production company focused on creative documentaries, premium drama and arthouse features. Its creative documentaries have been screened and received awards at many festivals, including Sundance, IDFA, Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, DOK Leipzig, Ji.hlava IDFF, Trento FF, Krakow FF and Docs Against Gravity IFF. Telemark has co-produced with partners including HBO, Arte, ZDF, BBC, TVP, YLE, Al Jazeera and Netflix.