Cannes Docs

Original Title: Ba's Book

Runtime: 105'

Expected Release: September 2026

Production Stage: Post-Production

Budget: €787,000 (95% in place)

1st Feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents, Distributors

Synopsis:

When a filmmaker receives her father’s memoir about the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution, she answers with a film. Returning to her ancestral village, she collaborates with her father and relatives to film participatory re-creations of their past. A true hybrid of live-action and documentary, Ba’s Book offers a disarming look at how a family moves forward from divisions caused by displacement and war.

Director’s Profile:

Ashley Da-Lê Duong is a Tiohtià:ke/Montréal-based filmmaker. Her directorial debut, A Time to Swim, earned the Special Jury Prize for Best Feature Documentary at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Ashley notably directed Space Explorers: Moonrise on the ISS, a documentary created from over 300 hours of footage filmed on the International Space Station — the largest production ever filmed in space. Her producing credits include Bedrock (Berlinale 2025). She is currently in post-production on the hybrid feature Ba’s Book. With over a decade of experience as a director and editor, Ashley’s practice spans documentary, hybrid, and live-action cinema with a wry, observational edge. Informed by a background in environmental studies, her work often explores how people and environments shape one another.

Producer’s Profile:

Ina Fichman, Oscar®, BAFTA, Emmy nominated and Peabody Award-winning producer, Intuitive Pictures, has been producing high-profile documentary and fiction films, and interactive projects for close to 30 years. Many of her creative documentaries have been released in theatres in Canada and abroad and have played at festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Hot Docs, Locarno, Karlovy Vary, CPH:DOX, Venice, SXSW, Tribeca, TIFF and others.
Recent films include Coexistence, My Ass!, Uvalde Mom and Everest Dark. Ina produced the Oscar-nominated documentary Fire of Love, which had its world premiere at Sundance 2022. Other films include Adrianne & the Castle, 7 Beats per Minute, The Bones, Stray, The Gig Is Up, Once upon a Sea, Blue Box, The Oslo Diaries, Inside Lehman Brothers, Gift and Laila at the Bridge, Amer Shomali’s The Wanted 18 and Monsoon (Canada’s Top 10).

Original Title: Parrandas

Runtime: 75'

Expected Release: September 2026

Production Stage: Post-Production

1st Feature: Yes

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents / Distributors, Buyers

Synopsis:

In a Cuban village where Christmas transforms into a dazzling yet perilous pyrotechnic battle, young Lazarito eagerly prepares to join the fiery tradition that scarred him as a child, navigating the tension between communal euphoria and the haunting risks of the festival’s dangerous splendor.

Director’s Profile:

Constance Chaput-Raby is captivated by the documentary genre, which she sees as a celebration of slowness and risk-taking. She is drawn to the new forms of storytelling in moving images and believes that, whether fiction or documentary, everything is cinema. She is currently developing two feature films: Live Free and Die, about the murder of her mother in Mount Washington, New Hampshire, and Parrandas, which explores a Cuban village with a rich tradition of pyrotechnics. Her previous medium-length film, En Éclaireuses, was featured in the 2020 Visions du Réel Media Library.

Producer’s Profile:

Isabelle Grignon-Francke – film producer, director and co-founder of Club Video – is currently working on her first theatrical feature films. She has produced over 10 short films (Mothers and Monsters, Ain’t No Time for Women) and continues to develop new ones. She also produced two television documentaries: Les Collectionneurs (Sarra El Abed), shot in Egypt, exploring the archiving of Arabic music, and Virage Vert (Amélie Hardy), about regulatory barriers to green innovation. As a director, she released The Sparkle in November 2023 (New York Times, RIDM, Hot Docs, Full Frame), a short documentary on Quebec’s itinerant fairground workers. Isabelle is passionate about intimate stories, international projects, and narrative ethics.

Original Title: Sisters of the Union

Runtime: 90'

Expected Release: January 2027

Production Stage: Post-Production

Budget: $296,637 (89% in place)

1st Feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents / Distributors, Buyers, Gap Financing

Synopsis:

Sisters of the Union is a fantastical autobiographical documentary about my family’s life during Communism in Romania. The story is told through the voices and challenging shifts of five women that each come to symbolize various eras from the rise to the decline of the Union.

Director’s Profile:

Dan Popa is a Canadian filmmaker of Romanian origin. Popa graduated in film production from Concordia University. In his work, we find new explorations, as much in the narrative form as in the aesthetic treatment of the image. Always in search of crafting a contemporary cinema voice, his filmmaking process draws inspiration from various visual languages.
He directed several short films which won awards in Canada and at several international film festivals. His most recent immersive Installation project Partitions for Aquamarine is in dialogue with Symphony in Aquamarine (2018), his first feature film. These two works offer a poetic exploration of human nature in the face of its world in transition.

Producer’s Profile:

Line Sander Egede, originally from Copenhagen and based in Montreal since 2015, began producing films in Denmark in 2010. She founded TAK Films in 2018, producing works such as Vacarme (2020) by Neegan Trudel and Gabor (2021) by Joannie Lafrenière, focusing on auteur-driven fiction and documentaries with strong social and artistic ambition. From 2021 to 2024, she was a partner at production company Art et Essai and, among other projects, produced Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023), which premiered in Venice and Toronto and was sold to over 70 territories.

Original Title: Steve's Version

Runtime: 75'

Expected Release: January 2027

Production Stage: Fine Cut

1st Feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents/Distributors, Gap Financing

Synopsis:

Filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz is asked by her uncle, Steve, to make a film about her grandfather, a violinist long absent from her work. With no archive and few answers, the project unravels. Heartbroken, she travels across Europe with a 16mm camera, tracing absence through memory and performance—until a final act of reanimation reveals what it means to bring someone back.

Director/Producer’s Profile:

Sofia Bohdanowicz is an award-winning filmmaker from Toronto. Her films have screened at Berlinale, Locarno, New York Film Festival, Göteborg, Viennale, FIDMarseille, and TIFF, and have been the subject of a retrospective on the Criterion Channel. Her feature MS Slavic 7 premiered at the Berlinale and screened at the Harvard Film Archive. Her fourth feature, A Woman Escapes (co-directed with Burak Çevik and Blake Williams), premiered in competition at FIDMarseille, where it received an Honourable Mention for the CNAP Prize, and was awarded the Kodak & Silverway Award at the FIDLab. Her latest film, Measures for a Funeral, premiered at TIFF. A Berlinale Talents and TIFF Talent Accelerator alum, she is currently a resident at the Academia de Cine in Madrid, where she is developing her sixth feature, La Tirana.

Sofia Bohdanowicz is also a producer, and founder of the production company « Maison du Bonheur Films », a production company she established five years ago. She has produced all of her feature films to date, developing a body of work grounded in artisanal, process-driven practices that move between fiction and documentary. Her films have been presented internationally at major festivals and cinematheques. As a producer, she is committed to creating intimate, collaborative environments that support formally adventurous cinema. Looking ahead, she aims to expand « Maison du Bonheur » to produce work by other independent filmmakers, with a focus on singular voices and rigorously crafted, artist-driven projects.