South Korea's Broadcast Media Telecommunications Commission and the Korea Communications Agency (KCA) will hold the 2026 Korean Documentary (K-DOCS) Festival at the Seoul Film Center, they said on Tuesday.

The event is linked to the EBS International Documentary Festival (EIDF). From Tuesday, it will run for four days with an opening ceremony, an awards ceremony, a domestic pitching session and documentary screenings.

The K-DOCS festival has been held since 2022 to revitalise South Korea's documentary industry and strengthen its global competitiveness. Domestic documentary creators, investors, broadcasters and industry officials from South Korea and abroad take part to discover promising projects and seek opportunities for production, investment and overseas expansion.

The opening ceremony will be held on Tuesday, the first day of the event. Domestic pitching sessions and an awards ceremony for outstanding documentaries will be held from Aug. 27 to 28. On the final day, Aug. 29, key works will be screened along with audience talks with creators.

A total of 29 works will take part in the domestic pitching sessions. They include 5 EBS Commissioning Pitch projects, 17 K-Doc Pitch projects and 7 HiDocs Pitch projects. Outstanding projects by category will receive prize money of 20 million to 50 million won.

The documentary screenings will present three films: "Becoming Kim", "Voices" and "8.15K Walking the Road to Independence in Hawaii". After the screenings, the directors and production teams will take part in talks with the audience to explain the production process and the meaning of the works.

"Becoming Kim" covers the 13-year love story of Susanna, a German woman, and Kim Jeong-rae, a South Korean man, and won the 2024 K-Pitch Prime excellence award. "Voices" revisits the Jeju 4.3 incident through the voices of four elderly women in Jeju, and won the 2023 K-Pitch Prime top prize and the documentary award in the special section at the 2024 Jeonju International Film Festival.

"8.15K Walking the Road to Independence in Hawaii" highlights the independence movement of first-generation Korean immigrants in Hawaii to mark the 80th anniversary of liberation. It was selected for the 2025 overseas Korean-language broadcasting support programme and won the best feature-length documentary award at the New York International Film Festival the same year.

Kim Jong-cheol (김종철), chair of the Broadcast Media Telecommunications Commission, said he hopes the event will provide an opportunity to share the value and impact of documentaries with the public.