Nick Cunningham

Hier, the title of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s short film selected for FID Marseille International Competition, means ‘here’ in Dutch but ‘yesterday’ in French, which adds potency to a work that in large part deals both with The Netherlands’ colonial past and its implications for the Dutch sense of ‘here and now.’ The director explains more.

Lucy Kerr’s arthouse triptych documentary, selected for FID’s Flash Competition plays both as a riveting piece of storytelling and a cri du coeur for safe practice within the movie stunt industry. The director straps in with Business Doc Europe.

Japanese director Kyosi Sugita talks to Business Doc Europe about his plot-free existential odyssey Haruhara San’s Recorder, selected for FIDMarseille’s International Competition and inspired by a tanka, a 31-syllable one line poem, written by the celebrated poet and author Naoko Higashi.

The 32nd FID Marseille kicks of July 19 with Mano a Mano by Priscilla Telmon and Mathieu Moon Saura, screened in the company of none other than the great footballing poet/thesp Eric Cantona. Festival director Jean-Pierre Rehm talks to BDE both about putting on this year’s event and about this year’s Guest of Honour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

At Cannes Docs, French director Jean-Gabriel Périot discussed both his Directors Fortnight selection Returning to Reims (Fragments) and his upcoming project Facing Darkness, both archive-based, during a panel organised by Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel.

Doclisboa and SOS Racismo unite at the Monument of the Discoveries 19-25 July with a programme that looks for possible alliances between cinema and the fight against racism. The programme kicks off 19 July with Olhares sobre o Racism, by Bruno Cabral, Eddie Pipocas and Dércio Ferreira.

Netherlands-based Chinese producer Jia Zhao of Muyi Film explains why she got involved in Zhao Liang’s urgent but nevertheless highly lyrical documentary on the ever present threat of nuclear catastrophe to the planet and humanity. The film screens in the Cinema for the Climate section.

At the beginning of the Doc Alliance Award-winning The Blunder of Love which tells of the relationship between director Rocco Di Mento’s maternal grandparents, we are immediately primed for what is to come: “I had no idea what abyss this dazzling thing we call love would pull me into,” says the filmmaker. He elaborates with BDE.

Gebrueder beetz filmproduction has commenced photography on a new high-end true-crime series about the “tumultuous history of Hamburg’s red-light-district in the 1980s.” With a working title of Reeperbahn Series, directors are Georg Tschurtschenthaler (showrunner), Carsten Gutschmidt and Ina Kessebohm. Release is planned for late 2022.

Six documentaries-in-progress were garlanded during the July 13 award ceremony of Cannes Docs 2021. The top prize of €10,000 was awarded to Cent’anni by Maja Doroteja Prelog. In total 32 projects from eight partner organisations competed for the prizes.