Business Doc Europe

One of eccentric artist Arek Pasożyt’s pet obsessions is to find traces of the Tatra Mountains Panorama, a long-lost massive painting from the 1890s that was 115 metres long and 16 metres high - but that was broken up. In Bigger Picture, world-premiering at MDAG, Polish director Mikołaj Janik follows Arek on this journey. The artist is strongly left-wing, Janik tells BDE. He doesn’t believe in consumer culture, and he is relentlessly cheerful, refusing to become downcast about setbacks. He further likens him to an ancient knight on a heroic quest, or to “some kind of Indiana Jones…”

The Spanish Civil War has a strong personal resonance for director Ricardo Iscar. Back then, four bodies of workers murdered by the Falangists were buried in a field owned by his family in Salamanca. In the documentary, these bodies are finally being exhumed, and Iscar is there to film the process. Seeing how viciously the war divided Spain in the 1930s, Iscar has a warning for viewers: “Nothing is guaranteed. The democracy and civil rights we have, we have to fight to keep them…”

In María Molina Peiró’s Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), a remote robot searches a distant planet both for minerals and signs of life, while far way, beside one of the oldest mines in the world, inhabitants live surrounded by mountains of mineral waste under which are buried both towns and memories. “The main protagonist of this place [is] not even the people or the landscape, but its ecosystem that extends far beyond its own physical and temporal frontiers or limits,” says director Molina Peiró.

In his feature debut, new graduate Felix Lange follows Eastern European lorry drivers on strike in Germany, their action prompted by anger at allegedly unpaid wages. The context is grim. Over 300,000 drivers from these countries work in the EU - and many are being viciously exploited. At first, some of the striking drivers were wary of Lange in their presence. “But then suddenly I met this very close group of 10 Georgians and they took me in…” he tells BDE.

In 1996, intrepid Swedish freelance journalist Erling Söderström was part of an expedition into the Amazon jungle with Brazilian ethnographer and social activist, Sydney Possuelo. They were trying to make “first contact” with the Korubo Indians. As we see in Nathan Grossman’s new feature doc, 30 years on the footage makes for highly uncomfortable viewing, with the encounter seeming both awkward and exploitative. “It shows what enormous risks there are in relationship to these contact events,” Grossman tells BDE. “It’s also why, today, these kind of situations should be avoided to the largest extent we can.”

After he read Joe Kane’s classic piece of travel journalism ‘Running The Amazon,’ about how, in the mid- 1980s, eleven intrepid Europeans set off on an epic journey by kayak across the entire length of the Amazon river, Polish director Rafał Skalski was immediately smitten. “When I read the book, I decided it was a great theme for documentary,” he tells BDE. “What intrigued me most was that the foreground was dominated by what was happening between the people [on the trip], the emotions, conflicts and relationships.”

Belarusian filmmaker Andrei Kutsila is currently in post-production on Letters (WT), a 90-minute documentary that portrays contemporary Belarus through the correspondences of people affected by political repression, imprisonment, exile and state violence. Produced by Mirosław Dembiński for Poland’s DocEdu Foundation, the film is a Poland-Germany-Lithuania co-production with inselfilm produktion and Moonmakers. BDE reports.

During the May 7 Opening Ceremony of the 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the feature documentary Fiume o morte! by Igor Bezinović was awarded the inaugural FIPRESCI Documentary Grand Prix, following a vote by members of the International Federation of Film Critics from around the world. The film has already received the European Film Award for Best European Documentary and was recognized at the Rotterdam festival, where it won both the Tiger Award in the Main Competition and the FIPRESCI Jury Prize.

Polish filmmaker Łukasz Kowalski is developing Children of the Black Garden, a new feature documentary rooted in the toxic legacy of Silesia’s industrial past, and the hidden story of a doctor who exposed mass lead poisoning among children in the 1970s. Produced by Anna Mazerant and Kowalski himself through 4.30 Studio, the project is among the titles being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8.

Polish filmmaker Maciej Bochniak is developing The Lawyer, a new feature documentary following the extraordinary case of Brian Mwenda, a Kenyan man who reportedly passed himself off as a lawyer, built a reputation in Nairobi’s legal circles and became a national controversy after his real credentials were called into question. “I was drawn to Brian’s story because, in a certain way, I had lived it myself — due to my own diagnosed impostor syndrome,” says Bochniak.

Polish helmers Sylwia Witowska and Piotr Wacowski are in mid-production on After Roll Call. Legio Patria Nostra, a feature documentary set inside a French Foreign Legion veterans’ home in Puyloubier, in the south of France. “This is not a film about war,” the filmmakers underline. “It is about what happens to a person when the system that shaped them no longer exists.”

In No Mother’s Land, pitching May 8 in Warsaw, director Wiktoria Davis Szymańska recounts her gripping decade-long ordeal to protect her daughter, all the time trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare. For Szymańska, the pitch also marks a decisive step in bringing to the screen a story she began filming long before it could be safely told. BDE reports.