Geoffrey Macnab

Ukrainian soldiers Shakhta, Potter and Dancer have a very close relationship with death, having returned to the front-line after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “People at war accept [the possibility of] their own death and it really changes you,” Hontaruk elaborates to BDE on the title of her feature documentary, selected for Karlovy Vary. “This transformation is really important and powerful inside a person. It is a key to this film. You need to find your desire to live - and life is stronger than death.”

There is an intriguing absence at the heart of Rosa Friedrich’s hybrid documentary My Friend the Porn Star (screening in Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and sold by New Docs). The director’s friend, the would-be porn star Timo, decided late on during the project that he didn’t want to appear in it any more. Undaunted, Friedrich took the bold decision to keep his body but to use AI to replace his face with that of another man. The director explains more to BDE.

Norwegian filmmaker Even Sigstad tells the story of how intrepid Norwegian climber Kristin Harila broke mountaineering records in 2023 when she and her Nepalese climbing partner, Tenjen Lama Sherpa, scaled 14 of the world’s highest peaks in the space of only 92 days. The trip, though, developed a very dark side when they were accused of leaving an injured Pakistani porter to die on K2. “We couldn’t foresee how the whole story would evolve and the controversy around it,” Sigstad reflects on the mountaineering story that turned into something very different and far more complex.

Try! follows four players from four Irish teams to the Mixed Ability Rugby World Cup in Spain, where 32 teams from 16 countries go head to head in fifteen-a-side, full-contact rugby played by people with and without physical and learning disabilities. ““There are so many stories. The biggest challenge for us was trying to find out which of these characters we should focus on because everybody involved in that community, just to get to the pitch, they have to overcome so many obstacles,” director Oisín Mistéil tells BDE.

As we see in the heart-wrenching new documentary, Syrian activist and co-director Wafa Mustafa continues to search for her father Ali, who disappeared under the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Of course, the fall of the regime is a new beginning for humanity, not just for Syria, but the fight continues,” Mustafa tells BDE. “The only thing that will give me hope is fighting every day for other young women not to lose their fathers because they dared to speak politics, or dreamed of a better reality.”

Dutch producer Renko Douze discusses Ukrainian Helena Maksyom’s feature doc Don't Ask Me If I Killed, sold by Esther van Messel’s First Hand Films, that chronicles the director’s life as a soldier in defence of her country. “It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and a very human perspective on the frontline,” Douze says.

In his feature documentary, Nigerian-American filmmaker Ose Oyamendan investigates the highly suspicious death in 1998 MKO Abiola, the charismatic billionaire businessman and media mogul who should have been President of Nigeria. “Going into this film, my first objective was that I am going to take my biases out of it. I am going to take out whatever preconceptions I have,” Oyamendan tells BDE. He was always respectful but, as he further notes, he is an activist who “was brought up to question and fight authority.”

There is hardly a corner of the UK that Doc Rowe, the man described as “Britain’s great folklorist,” hasn’t visited and chronicled. He is indefatigable in his attempts to get to these events, if his health will allow it. “There’s a uniformity to them, in that they speak to people’s need for ritual and belonging, but there is also a uniqueness about every single one of them,” Curry suggests of the folk festivals, and Doc Rowe’s fascination for them.

“We are really a nurturing festival. We can take care of each of the films and we promise you will not get lost in an avalanche of too many,” Sheffield DocFest boss Raul Niño Zambrano explains why he favours a streamlined, yet expansive approach within his selection. “I think, for us, balance is the key word,” he reflects on how the festival addresses the huge social and political convulsions of the current era while also finding space for lighter fare.

Time Machine Maidan has been described by its co-director Roman Liubyi as “an upside-down mockumentary.” The film (also directed by Volodymyr Tykhyy) is structured like a time travel fantasy, but deals in forensic detail with some seismic moments in recent Ukrainian history. Liubyi talks to Business Doc Europe on the eve of Sheffield DocFest, where it world premieres in International Competition.