Business Doc Europe

In Edgar Hagen’s new film, The Roots Of Madness (screening in The National Competition at Visions Du Réel), the filmmaker accompanies the near-legendary German war reporter Ulrich Tilgner on a journey back to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. “The special thing about him is that he always tried to understand the people, not only the politics,” Hagen observes of the journalist’s humanistic, ground-level approach to his work.

In his essay-style documentary, director G. Anthony Svatek uses the story of Alexander von Humboldt, once the world’s most famous scientist, as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues. “I thought the strongest way to do that is in the form of a love letter from me to him, showing him what is left of his vision of an interconnected world and how technology has totally changed this idea of a holistic ecology that he proposed.”

Ghost Town (screening in official selection in Vision Du Réel) joins the growing ranks of documentaries and docudramas set in taxis. The setting is Kamaishi, a small Japanese town where the locals haven’t been able to exorcise memories of the devastating 2011 tsunami. As we discover, the catastrophe still dominates the conversations and even the dreams of the local people. Director Katharine Round discusses her new work with BDE.

A Fire There (sold by Filmotor) sees Montreal-based filmmaker Marlene Edoyan venturing to the remote village of Gandzani, a predominantly Armenian enclave within southern Georgia. Her three main characters are young men on the cusp of adulthood and facing familiar decisions about their future. “It was like finding a part of my past almost,” Edoyan says. “I came across a group of people [and] recognised something very familiar, maybe a fragment of my story of displacement.”

It is well known that in space, nobody can hear you scream, but in the case of the astronauts on the 1973 NASA Skylab mission, nobody could hear their demands for better working conditions either. Everything the crew did was measured by their controllers in Houston who wanted as much data as possible about how humans coped in space - and didn’t care a jot for their well-being. In his new feature doc, nominated by Visions du Réel for the Doc Alliance Prize, UK doccer Graeme Arnfield investigates the incident further. He reports in to BDE.

Shot in the Persian Gulf, the feature doc Heat, directed by Jacqueline Zünd, deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. “It's like a magnifying glass amplifying all these differences, especially the economic and social disparities,” Zünd tells Business Doc Europe. “Because there is a certain [very high] temperature, rich people do not leave their houses anymore… Meanwhile, the poor people are dying out there, or maybe having heatstroke, while delivering food at noon when they call for lunch. It's really crazy.”

In Small Talk, director Mateo Ybarra turns his attention toward the mysterious world of a Swiss finishing school - a place where women come to learn those last lessons in etiquette that will enable them to thrive in high society. “For me, it was really important to be as transparent as possible and to open a dialogue,” the director insists to BDE. He may not share the school’s values but he was determined to treat his subjects with respect. “To make fun of people or to be condescending was not of interest to me.”

Summer Drift (aka Virages) was presented this week in Vision Du Reel’s “Swiss Films Presents” showcase. A few minutes of footage were shown but audiences and buyers will have the chance to see the entire movie next month when it has its world premiere in the Cannes Festival Acid section. “I would say it’s a documentary-comedy, a ‘fiction-réel’ as we say in France, turned into a summer comedy,” producer Aurélien Marsais suggests to BDE.

“It’s always good to tell sad stories with a glimpse of burlesque humour,” Italian-Swiss director Davide Tisato reflects on his new project Two Donkeys and a Saint (Il Nostro Miracolo, presented this week in Visions du Réel’s ‘Swiss Films Previews’ strand). In the film, a motley crew of inhabitants from rural Tuscany set out on a 200km walk to the Vatican in Rome to petition the Pope to intervene on behalf of their struggling community. They’re accompanied by two donkeys and a statue of a local saint, ‘Santa Caterina.’

US indie cinema’s most fastidious (and ostensibly fiction) director Kelly Reichardt talked at length about her love of small things and her “granular” approach to filmmaking during her VdR Masterclass, presented April 21. “While we were having lunch, Emilie [Bujès, VdR Artistic Director) was trying to convince me that there is not a difference [between documentary and fiction]. As I said, I don’t know how documentaries are made. It is such a different process. I love watching them…[but] everything I do, it’s all made up!”

MDAG Industry will take place from 7 to 11 May in Warsaw’s State Ethnographic Museum. ”From working with personal and family archives, through giving voice to communities living in the shadow of political change, to practical accessibility tools – this year, the Industry programme brings together filmmakers, producers and institutions who treat inclusivity not as an add-on, but as a foundation of contemporary documentary cinema,” organisers write. ”The guiding theme of this year’s programme is the voices that have been kept on the margins for far too long.”

With a program structured around five thematic threads of Art, Change, Female Lens, Nature and Together, this year’s edition presents a total of 46 international documentary feature films and 12 short films. Non-fiction book readings, live podcasts, and a virtual reality exhibition will offer alternative entry points into documentary storytelling. Running May 27 to June 7, Doxumentale “transforms Potsdamer Platz into a vibrant meeting space for film, literature, podcasts, and immersive media."