The network coordinates festival programming, professional cooperation and the annual Doc Alliance Award, through which its member festivals select and promote notable documentary works. The winners are announced at Cannes Docs, part of the Marché du Film, the film-industry market held alongside the Cannes Film Festival.
It also established DAFilms, an online distribution platform for documentary and experimental cinema, which was launched in 2009. It has received financial support from the European Union’s Creative Europe programme.
Distribution platform
The main project of the Doc Alliance is DAFilms.com, an online distribution platform for documentary and experimental films focused on European cinema, which hosts around 1700 films for streaming or download. The films include archive historical films and works by international filmmakers such as Ulrich Seidl, Jorgen Leth, and Chris Marker.
Doc Alliance Award
The Doc Alliance Award is an annual award for documentary filmmaking presented by the Doc Alliance network. Each member festival, together with a selected guest festival, nominates one feature-length documentary and one short film from its previous programme.
The winners are selected by an international jury of film-industry professionals. The awards carry prizes of €5,000 for Best Feature Film and €3,000 for Best Short Film, intended to support the filmmakers' subsequent work. The short-film category was introduced in 2021.
The location of the award ceremony has varied. In 2015, the feature-film award was presented during the industry programme of the Locarno Film Festival, while the 2026 awards were presented at the Doc Day Lunch during the Marché du Film in Cannes.