The Visegrad region’s leading rough-cut training programme has revealed its selection for 2026. dok.incubator has chosen eight documentary projects to enter the workshop, where filmmaking teams spend five months refining their films’ cut and dramaturgy alongside international editors, producers and sales agents ahead of premieres planned for 2027.
This year’s lineup gravitates toward artists whose creative work becomes entangled with survival, protest, or self-definition. In Slava, director Soňa G. Lutherová follows opera director Sláva Daubnerová as she brings avant-garde stagings to European houses while searching for something beyond professional accomplishment. My Shining Darkness, directed by Lia Lőrinczy, turns to blind pianist Tamás Érdi and the two women who have organised his life around his music: his mother, Márta, and his wife, Réka. Celina Przyklęk’s Not So Silent Protest tracks a Polish artist whose activism gradually consumes the career and relationships it was meant to serve. Generation Nika: Young and Restless, from Zdeněk Chaloupka and Vojtěch Hönig, follows Ukrainian teenagers documenting their own wartime lives, made after a 17-year-old participant in the film’s original workshop was killed in a missile strike.
Elsewhere, the selection turns toward memory and inherited obligation. Peter Kerekes’s Marathon uses the world’s oldest continuously run marathon, staged in Košice for a century, as a lens onto the shifting governments that have passed through the city. Valley of the Heart, directed by Theodora Remundová, follows a young Nepalese man who leaves his highland village for Europe, only to find that distance does not fully loosen his family’s claims on him. Barbora Johansson’s Layers of Disobedience studies people who broke the law for those they loved, asking what remains of individual agency under expanding regulation. The Curse, directed by Jakub Jakubik, sets a self-described \”documentary horror\” in a small Polish town where a former synagogue now sells liquor and a nearby pond keeps claiming lives.
The eight projects span Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian production, with additional partners in Italy and France, continuing dok.incubator’s focus on filmmakers working within and around the Visegrad countries.
