Geoffrey Macnab

In Saudades Eternas, an international premiere in Ji.hlava, French director Emma Boccanfuso follows the remarkable Mother Courage-like Sueli, a flamboyant local woman living in a Rio favela and fighting to hold her extended family together, while running her own makeshift bar and enjoying plenty of gossip with the neighbours. “I very quickly found myself propelled into the heart of the home and the intimacy of this family,” the director tells BDE. “From there, a deep friendship was born, to the point that I have been coming back several times a year to see them for the past ten years.”

Czech filmmaker Filip Remunda has known Blanka Kulová, the daughter of maverick photographer Vlastimil Kula, most renowned for his nude and erotic photography, since they were teenagers. Now, Remunda and Kulová have collaborated on Love Exposed, a “tragicomic documentary” that explores the fiery relationship between daughter and father. By participating in the documentary, through her art and through therapy, she is trying to break a long-lasting cycle of family misery and misunderstanding. “She is fragile but also powerful,” the director says of his collaborator.

In the mountains of Bulgaria is a sprawling hotel that Munich-based property developer Mathias Zeitler has turned into a remote haven for digital nomads. “Everyone in the digital nomad world knew him. I was never interested in the digital nomads, but Matthias himself was the character who was interesting to me,” director Julia Groteclaes tells BDE. The thing is, it took a while for Matthias to understand that Groteclaes wasn’t just there to make a promotional film on his behalf, and that she might actually have an agenda of her own.

Cats and dogs feature very prominently in Life Is There, the lyrical and evocative new documentary directed by Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez that receives its world premiere in Ji.hlava’s Opus Bonum competition. “I don’t want human beings in the centre of the story. I think that the animals are living with us,” the director tells BDE. “In the film, I talk about orphans. These animals are also like orphans, in really dangerous situations. I feel a real identification with them…also, I wanted to say that these animals are sacred for me.”

Several years ago, Berlin-based filmmaker Janis Westphal heard about a very unusual housing project in the heart of Berlin Kreuzberg whose residents are homeless alcoholics. Originally founded by a priest, it was one of the first facilities of its kind - a place which followed a radical policy of ‘acceptance.’ In his feature doc Haus der Trinker (Last Round), world-premiering in Leipzig, Janis Westphal tells the story of the establishment, and meets some of its residents. He answer questions posed by BDE.

James Longley’s tale of a hard-working Afghan boy living in an orphanage alongside other sons of “martyrs,” undergoing a strict religious education, seemed like a bureaucratic nightmare to make, until US producer Alex Gibney stepped in. “I can't think of another producer alive who would have taken on a project with so many inherent risks,” Longley tells BDE. “Without an Alex Gibney, films like this - where the path is rocky and the outcome is initially uncertain - will stop being made.”

In his low budget feature documentary, made on the hoof and world-premiering in Leipzig, Lukas Marxt observes the Los Angeles fires that broke out in late 2024/early 2025. “It is very difficult to describe the mix of feelings you have,” Marxt tells Business Doc Europe. “Obviously, fire always brings a certain kind of beauty - but there is no beauty in this destruction where people are really losing everything they have, and partially their future.”

To say that Anne, the subject of Konrad Schlaich’s feature doc world-premiering in Leipzig, has a tough life would be to understate it. She is an impoverished single mother in her mid 30s who has a history of addiction and whose teenage daughter, Leonie, 14, is already in trouble, missing school and slipping into drug dependency too. “At first, I was judging Anne as a very bad mother, but then I ended up talking to her and I was very surprised how much she shared about her past,” the director recalls to BDE. “I wanted to know more and I felt very intrigued about making a portrait of her.”

In Éric Baudelaire’s Car la lune, a European premiere in main competition at Ji.hlava IDFF, blind students in Paris use both their cameras and creativity to illustrate their very particular perception of the world. “Any film, particularly a documentary film, has to be built on trust,” the director reflects to Business Doc Europe on his decision to hand over cameras to his subjects.

Noli me Tangere (a world premiere in Lisbon) is one of the many essay films that renowned Lebanese auteur, Ghassan Salhab, has made over the years. He began working on it in the spring of this year, just before the new conflict with Israel flared up, at which point Salhab was stopped in his tracks for three or four weeks. But he eventually resumed work, shooting material until July of this year. “I decided that if the war entered into my life, not for the first time unfortunately, let it enter into the film,” he tells BDE.