The 2025 edition of the Ex Oriente workshop programs – Ex Oriente Features and Ex Oriente Series – continues its mission to support daring, author-driven documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe. This year’s edition brings together 11 feature-length documentary projects and 5 docuseries in development or early production stage, selected for their creative potential and international relevance.
Participants will engage in a cycle of three intensive residential workshops held across Europe, receiving in-depth mentorship from top international experts. Covering story development, visual approach, production strategies, co-productions, legal frameworks, and festival placement, the program culminates with a final pitch at the East Doc Forum during the East Doc Platform in Prague.
Feature-length documentary projects
Creative feature-length documentary projects in the development and early production stage, which challenge genres, format and media boundaries. We welcome filmmakers who conduct intense and engaging experiences and who change the way we reflect our reality. Projects are to be represented by a producer-director team.
Documentary series projects
Factual creative documentary series in development and early production stage with original idea and vision for an episodic documentary project with international potential. Projects are to be represented by creatives/directors, and the producers team.
This edition will be shaped by an experienced team of tutors who bring a wide range of perspectives and expertise. For Ex Oriente Features, the tutors include Gitte Hansen, a highly respected mentor and executive producer with extensive international experience from IDFA to Nordisk Panorama; Filip Remunda, award-winning director and co-founder of the Institute of Documentary Film and Hypermarket Film, recognized for impactful titles like Czech Dream; Ivana Pauerová Miloševičová, co-founder of the Institute of Documentary Film, director with a focus on politically and socially engaged documentaries and Head of Documentaries at Czech Television; Diana El Jeiroudi, acclaimed filmmaker and co-founder of DOX BOX, whose work bridges artistic vision and industry activism with credits like Republic of Silence and 5 Seasons of Revolution; and Christian Popp,producer with more than 40 films to his name, former ARTE commissioning editor, and longtime mentor across Europe’s leading doc platforms. For Ex Oriente Series, the lead tutor is Ruth Reid, an experienced producer and consultant who has held roles at both HBO and Netflix, with a career spanning two decades across festival films, global streaming content, and high-profile docuseries. There will also be several guest tutors, you can explore a continuously updated list of all of them below.
Tutors of the 2025 edition
This year, we have selected exceptional projects from 17 countries, which reflect a broad range of voices and creative visions, including Not so far away places (dir. Renato Borrayo Serrano, Yulia Vishnevets), My Dear Vira (dir. Olga Chernykh, Maryna Brodovska), Total Mess (dir. Oleksandra Horiienko), Shape of Silence (dir. Varun Trikha), Children of the Moon Land (dir. Roman Ďuriš), Dance with Me (dir. Leila Basma), I had a Dream about an Elephant (dir. Štefan Straka), Symphony of Seasons (dir. Sami Mustafa), Tendrils (dir. Mateusz Góra, Kamil Wilk), I was told to save the world (dir. Hana Piscevic, Nebojsa Resanovic), and House in a Bottle (r. Anna Morawiec). The selected series include Hijacked Life (dir. Andrius Lekavičius), Grandpa was a genius (dir. Kalina Nikolova), World Divided (dir. Soňa Nôtová, Štefan Straka), Justice as legalised terror (dir. Zora Cejnková), and When The Wind Blows (dir. Anna Savchenko).
LIST OF PARTICIPATING PROJECTS
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The Ex Oriente Film is a member of the Audiovisual Training Coalition (ATC), which is a partnership of leading institutions dedicated to training professionals in the European film and audiovisual sector. It is also a member of DAE – the members network for documentary professionals from inside and outside of Europe, and the collaborative initiative #DocSafe, that aims to raise questions, research answers, raise awareness, advocate and ultimately create recommendations and best practices for the documentary industry about ways to make our shared space(s) safer for all. 
