Nick Cunningham

One of awards season’s highest profile film events, the 37th Annual IDA Documentary Awards ceremony, is set for February 5 2022 in Hollywood. The event will be in-person and will mark the organization's 40th year of serving the doc community.

Once again, documentaries are in the ascendant at the 27th Sarajevo FF running August 13-20. Core to the doc offer is a competition of 16 films, eight of which are world prems, and 16 new projects from Central, Eastern and South-east Europe, chosen for their wide international appeal and distribution potential. Industry manager Maša Marković explains the doc component to BDE.

Birds’ Eye View has announced the appointment of Melanie Iredale as the new Director of Birds’ Eye View Film. In this role Melanie will lead the team, continuing to advocate for gender equality and diversity in all film spaces and lead on the #ReclaimTheFrame project to bring ever greater audiences to films by women.

The Board of Copenhagen Film Festivals (CFF) has appointed Birgitte Fredsby as Managing Director of the organization behind the three biggest Danish film festivals: CPH:DOX, CPH PIX and BUSTER. She will work in close co-operation with Niklas Engstrøm who was appointed as Artistic Director in May 2021.

In a film whose colour palette registers the melancholic aesthetic of a Rembrandt painting, Polish filmmaker Karol Pałka goes deep into the heart of the Polish countryside to chronicle four years in the lives of mother Danusia and daughter Basia, in the process telling a moving story of longing and absence. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Samuel G Barbosa’s debut feature documentary, about the late Portuguese experimental master filmmaker Paulo Rocha, is described as “a dialogue between master and apprentice,” and offers a unique perspective on a European auteur whose work demands reappraisal by new audiences. Barbosa explains why to Business Doc Europe.

In Eliane Esther Bots’ In Flow of Words, interpreters from the Balkan region must apply the same level of neutrality and detachment to the evidence and testimonies they hear at the Yugoslavia Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, whether it be from victims or those suspected/accused of perpetrating war crimes.

Intimacy is at the core of Naomi Pacifique’s short film ‘after a room,’ made at the London Film School and selected for Locarno Pardi di domani. But while the two main characters, Naomi and Ram (and at times a third, Marina), are often naked, it is not sexual or romantic intimacy that the director is interested in portraying. Director Pacifique explains more.

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. Director Francesco Montagner explains more to Business Doc Europe.

“Oil is in some ways at the centre of the biggest challenge facing mankind right now,” director Saeed Taji Farouky tells Business Doc Europe about his new film A Thousand Fires, world-premiering at Locarno. “It's a political issue. It's an issue of climate. It’s an issue of capitalism and exploitation.”