The selection for the Short Pitch Program 2026 has been officially unveiled, bringing together seven promising short documentary projects from across the CEE region. The program will take place on May 10, 2026, in Warsaw, Poland, as part of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity film festival.
Designed to support emerging filmmakers working on short documentary formats, the Short Pitch Program offers a dynamic platform to present projects to key industry professionals, including sales agents, distributors, and festival representatives. Organized by the Institute of Documentary Film in cooperation with Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the initiative continues to foster new voices and innovative storytelling within the regional documentary landscape.
This year’s edition will feature seven selected teams, each presenting their project in an 8-minute pitch followed by a Q&A session. The pitching event, moderated by Emilia Mazik, will take place at the National Ethnographic Museum (Kredytowa 1) on Sunday, May 10.
In preparation for the public presentation, participants will take part in an online group training session on April 17. Unlike previous editions, the training will be conducted collectively, encouraging peer exchange alongside expert feedback. Filmmakers will deliver a 3-minute mini pitch without visual support and receive input from both the tutor and fellow participants, helping them refine their storytelling and presentation skills ahead of the main event.
Following the pitching session, the teams will engage in one-on-one meetings with invited decision-makers. These meetings, structured as 10-minute sessions with short breaks in between, provide a valuable opportunity for direct interaction with industry professionals and potential partners.
Event horizon (dir. Jakub Gomółka, prod. Korek Bojanowski (Polish Filmmakers Association - Munk Studio), 15 min., Poland, planned premiere: January 2027)
Coal is 330 million years old and is mined from the depths of the earth to fuel smelters. At 1,500°C the steel takes the shape of a car, which crashes at 94 km/h into a tree planted in 1951. The weight of the ashes after a human cremation is 2.4 kg. It takes 150 kilocalories to publish a single post on reddit.com. A grieving person shares their loss in the digital space.
Kyiv under my wheels (dir. Marina Baibarza, prod. Marina Baibarza (Process Films), 20 min., Ukraine, Poland, planned premiere: August 2026)
Born from my lived experience as a taxi driver in wartime Kyiv, this film unfolds inside a moving car, where the city’s constant noise, financial precarity, and emotional exhaustion have become everyday reality. Driving through endless streets and carrying strangers from place to place, I search for a rare and fragile silence, a moment quiet enough to hear myself again. Each passenger brings their own way of speaking to Kyiv: through confessions, jokes, fears, memories, and hopes. Their voices merge with mine, forming an intimate portrait of the city seen from the driver’s seat, where every ride is a brief encounter and a reflection of Kyiv’s collective heartbeat.
Lefek (dir. Tomasz Misiukiewicz, prod. Tomasz Misiukiewicz (Wajda School), 23 min., Poland, planned premiere: September 2026)
In a small workshop near Warsaw, Bernadeta runs a Hospital for Dolls and Plush toys. Within just a few square meters, there is everything: piles of toys, drawers full of fabrics, tools, spare parts. A micro-world. And the whole world for her.
By following her work, we observe how she brings beloved toys back to life and discover touching stories of her clients.
Bernadeta notices that we live in a world full of objects. We own so many that they lose their meaning. So she decides to fight an unequal battle against consumerism by repairing the precious ones. It's also a pretext to tell that each of us needs unconditional love, understanding and to be listened.
The film’s structure is based on showing one day of Bernadeta’s work, with the action taking place entirely inside her workshop.
Naples, Florida (dir. Modesta Žemgulytė, prod. Akvilė Žilionytė-Khan (Artišokai), 17 min., Lithuania, planned premiere: August 2025)
In 1997, the author’s family illegally emigrates to Florida, to the town of Naples, in search of a better life. They settle in a small two-room apartment, celebrate their first Christmas, and soon the mother starts working as a housekeeper and takes on two full-time jobs. After three years of stress and overwork, the mother experiences her first episode of psychosis. The dream of a new life across the Atlantic becomes a turning point in her mental health. More than twenty years later, as she approaches the age her mother was when her illness began, the filmmaker hopes to find answers in archival material and in conversations with her mother today.
Bell Boy (dir. Akseli Leppänen, prod. Akseli Leppänen (Baltic Film and Media School), 20 min., Estonia, planned premiere: June 2026)
Supavit Nummelin is a 27 year old young man, who lives in the Finnish countryside by himself, along with over 1800 church bells; his greatest interest.
The source of his 20 year old obsession with church bells started out with a small miniature world he built in his childhood home with his Finnish adoptive father. The miniature world served as a blueprint of his future dreams of building big bell towers and forging church bells, as well as giving him room to dream about other such radical endeavours, while also functioning as an escape from his struggles of not fitting in.
Now he is preparing to bring more of his long time dreams into the real world. As he is attempting to play church bells on a hot air balloon, as well as starring as the main organ player in an upcoming church concert.
Victory Day (dir. Wojciech Węglarz, prod. Jakub Orłoś (Fala Film), 15 min., Poland, Norway, planned premiere: January 2026)
For Wojtek, a representative of the generation raised in a free Poland, war had been an abstract concept – until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A sense of helplessness and shame first drove him to volunteer at the border, and then deeper into Ukraine. However, the sight of victims and ruins did not give him an answer to the question about the source of evil. Seeking a confrontation with the “Russian world,” yet unable to cross the border of the Russian Federation, the director travels to an extraordinary place – Barentsburg, a Russian mining settlement located on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard – to witness the celebration of the "Victory day".
Last crime we don't remember (dir. Barbora Venclová & Mariana Kozáková, prod. Jitka Kotrlová, 2x15 min., Czech Republic, planned premiere: October 2027)
The project consists of two short archival documentary films in which two directors independently work with the same historical material. Each approaches the archive from a different angle, and together they create a layered portrait of Czechoslovak society on the eve of the Velvet Revolution. Against the backdrop of a collapsing regime and an emerging free society, the actions of an extremist youth group — including a series of violent acts and a murder that have since largely faded from public memory — gradually disappear from public discourse. While one director reconstructs a detective investigation into these forgotten crimes, uncovering their circumstances and consequences, the other focuses on the subsequent actions of the secret police.