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In her first media interview published ahead of the world premiere of her debut feature “Fragments of Ice” at Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel, Ukrainian director Maria Stoianova tells Variety how her film’s intention shifted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Based entirely on archival footage shot on a camcorder by her father, a figure skater in former Soviet Ukraine, the film is voiced by the director, who was born in 1986 and takes the viewer back to the mid 80s and early 90s through her family’s story, as they experience the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of their dreams of a Western paradise.

Variety debuts the film’s trailer below.

Stoianova started editing in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her father, she explains in the voice-over, filmed enthusiastically during his foreign tours with the Ukrainian Ensemble Ballet on Ice as well as moments spent with his family,...

In parts of the Balkans, a remarkable tradition exists: women known as Burrneshas take on societal roles typically confined to men. They assume the physical appearance of men, adopt men’s names or nicknames, and operate with a freedom and power denied women in patriarchal cultures.

The documentary House with a Voice examines this exceptional cultural practice that has existed for centuries in parts of Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro. The film directed by Kristine Nrecaj and Birthe Templin holds its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece on Friday – fittingly, International Women’s Day, a day highlighting issues of gender equality and patriarchy.

‘House with a Voice’

A synopsis of the film explains, “This unique societal phenomenon sees these women changing their gender socially by cutting their hair, donning male attire, adopting masculine names, and integrating themselves into male-dominated spaces.

“The unconventional practice of taking on male roles serves various purposes,...

As the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival embarks on its second quarter-century, with its 26th edition kicking off March 7, the event’s industry arm continues to look for ways to reinvent itself. “We are educating ourselves. We are asking the local and the regional industries and communities, ‘What do you need from us?’” says Angeliki Vergou, who heads the Agora industry program. “I believe in this open dialogue…with our colleagues about the challenges they face and we face [as we] try to figure it out together.”

A perennial highlight of the industry program is the Agora’s co-production and co-financing forum, which takes place March 11 and will present 12 projects in development by documentary filmmakers from Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and the Black Sea region. Another highlight, Agora Docs in Progress, held March 12, showcases 11 films nearing completion and ready to hit the festival circuit this year.

Recent titles to take part in the...

Exclusive: The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s industry-focused Agora section has selected 12 projects from 11 countries for this year’s Thessaloniki Pitching Forum and 11 films from 16 countries for the Agora Docs in Progress sidebar. Scroll down for the full list of projects.

All selected projects are from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean region.

The re-shaped Thessaloniki Pitching Forum is the festival’s co-financing and co-production forum for documentaries in development. Recent projects that have passed through the program include Boylesque, which premiered at Hot Docs 2022, Dead Sea Guardians, which premiered at Haifa Iff (2021) and was screened in Thessaloniki (2022), Karaoke Nation premiered at Cph: Dox (2022), A Steady Job premiered at Visions du Reel (2022), We Will Not Fade Away premiered at Berlinale 2023 and Mighty Afrin (Greece) premiered at Thessaloniki Idf 2023 and won the WWF Award.

This year, the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum has secured three new awards for its participants.

Kyiv-based Kovalenko already has two films playing at IDFA film, ’Girl Away From Home’ and ’We Will Not Fade Away’

Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko, whose new film Girl Away From Home (co-directed with Oscar nominated Simon Lereng Wilmont) world premieres at IDFA this week, has revealed further details of her two new projects.

Kovalenko is already at work on what promises to be a harrowing film about Ukrainian women who survived captivity, torture and sexual violence at the hands of Russians from 2014 onward.

“It is a very heavy topic. There are six women…it’s a psychological multi-portrait. All the...

Selection includes Nicolas Philibert’s Golden Bear winner ‘On The Adamant’.

The 14 feature documentaries in the running for the 2023 European Film Awards (EFAs) have been announced.

Scroll down for full list of titles

They include Nicolas Philibert’s On The Adamant, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in February. The film follows the daily lives of patients and caregivers at a central Paris psychiatric centre, which has a unique structure floating in the Seine river. French filmmaker Philibert previously won the best European documentary prize at the EFAs in 2002 with To Be And To Have (Être Et Avoir...

Hot Docs has wrapped its 30th anniversary edition, handing out its top cash prize and announcing the audience top picks after an 11-day festival, which presented 214 films from 72 countries at 308 live screenings at venues across Toronto.

Philippe Falardeau’s “Lac-Mégantic—This Is Not an Accident” topped the overall audience poll to win the 2023 Hot Docs Audience Award. The four-part series from the Oscar-nominated director explores the causes of one of Canada’s worst rail disasters and what’s needed to prevent such accidents in the future.

“Someone Lives Here,” by Zack Russell, won the Rogers Audience Awards for Best Canadian Documentary, which comes with Cdn. $50,000 cash, and also claimed the second-highest spot in the overall audience poll. The film also won the inaugural Bill Nemtin Award for Best Social Impact Documentary, a jury-chosen prize, at the main awards ceremony held Saturday.

“Someone Lives Here”

“Someone” tells the story of Toronto carpenter Khaleel Seivwright,...

Last year, during an online panel at Hot Docs film festival featuring Ukrainian documentary filmmakers who were staying in place, Oksana Karpovych told attendees how she’d gained knowledge working alongside foreign media crews covering the war, and was now applying that to her own creative documentary projects.

This year, at the festival’s 30th anniversary edition, Karpovych attended the in-person Forum market event to pitch “Intercepted” — her observational doc exploring the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — which ended up winning the 2023 Cmf-Hot Docs Canadian Pitch Prize.

With Ukraine in the spotlight at Hot Docs this year, both audiences and industry attendees are getting wide exposure to the films and ideas of leading Ukrainian documentary creators. The timing of this programming is perfect, said Hot Docs programmer Myrocia Watamaniuk, not only for the obvious reason.

“Ukrainian documentary cinema has grown in lockstep with the documentary community around the world,...

Following the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cph:dox documentary film festival in Copenhagen has shown its support for and solidarity with the Ukrainian film industry via a new cash-prize and two industry events.

A special Eurimages Development Award will go to one of the Ukrainian projects selected to participate in the Cph:forum, the financing and co-production event held during Cph:dox. The selected project will come with a cash-prize of €20,000 provided by the Council of Europe’s Eurimages Fund. The new prize is an addition to the long-standing Eurimages Co-Production Development Award of €20,000 for the best pitch, that will be awarded for the tenth year running.

Of the 34 projects selected for the Cph:forum, four Ukrainian productions or co-productions are eligible for the new prize: “Bit of a Stranger,” “Cuba & Alaska,” “Memo ’94” and “Red Zone.”

Niklas Engstrøm, artistic director of Cph:dox, said: “We see our festival as an agora...