Nick Cunningham

19th Doclisboa (21-31 October) opens with a double header featuring Landscapes of Resistance by Marta Popivoda and The Earth Is Still Blue When I Get Off Work, by Sérgio Silva. Closing film is The Tale of King Crab by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. The festival also welcomes Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane by Charlotte and Steve McQueen’s Uprising.

DOK Leipzig’s 2021 film programme will take place entirely in the city’s cinemas, once again placing greater emphasis on film history with the showing of a Retrospective and two Matinees that had to be postponed in 2020. From Retrospectives to Homages, animation art and more, 10 film series for this year's festival have been finalised.

Even before Covid, there was loneliness. Finnish Antti Lempiäinen offers three perspectives on suffering, a recently divorced man of 80, a single mum looking for romance and a young techno-loving female gamer who roams the streets of her town in her car to find some measure of solace. The director explains his film to Business Doc Europe.

When Marius Lunde, close friend of director Frederik S. Hana, decides to track down the mother who abandoned him when he was a child, the subsequent odyssey is presented not only as emotionally charged documentary storytelling, but as a piece of bravura and inventive genre filmmaking. Hana explains his exquisite visual mash-up doc to Business Doc Europe.

Following on from their Toxic Playground (2009), directors William Johansson Kalén and Lars Edman return to the Chilean town of Arica to continue their investigation into the poisoning of the town people, caused by Swedish waste dumped there in 1984. But this time the town has lawyers fighting its corner, as the filmmakers explain to Business Doc Europe.

A documentary about the great mass of contradictions that is Eurovision was always going to be a winner. But lob in an Icelandic grenade in the form of the BDSM-wearing anti-capitalist band Hatari who sing of hate, debauchery and the purposelessness of life, and you’ve got gold dust. A Song Called Hate director Anna Hildur talks to Business Doc Europe.

Full live programme to include actress Charlotte Gainsbourg’s directorial debut, the story of LSD populariser Timothy Leary, a unique focus on Romanian experimental cinema and a retrospective of Slovak-Czech ethnographer Karol Plicka. After 6 days of live screenings 26-31 October, a fortnight of online screenings will commence November 1.

Sourced from 36 countries, the 35 projects are in development or at an early stage of production. ‘The selection consists of projects with a great artistic vision that are developed for an international audience, aim for a theatrical release and have the potential for international co-productions,’ say Market organisers.

The fourth edition of the Al Jazeera Balkans International Documentary Film Festival (AJB DOC) closed September 14 with an award ceremony held at the Kovači Multimedial Center in Sarajevo. Main Award goes to Wait For Me by Damir Markovina. Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Gosh’s Writing With Fire win the Al Jazeera Balkans Programme Department Jury Award.

Before he begins a 23-month prison sentence, a Muslim veteran of the war in the Balkans sets a series of tasks for his three sons, each of whom goes through a significant personal evolution over the subsequent two-year period. The film received a Special Mention from the Jury of AJB DOC Competition. Director Francesco Montagner talks to Business Doc Europe.