Geoffrey Macnab

Music doc Phil Lynott: Songs For While I'm Away premiered in the UK recently to considerable acclaim at Alexandra Palace as part of the Doc N Roll music documentary festival. However, the film’s theatrical life in the UK has been hampered by the COVID lockdown.

“In established power structures, there are many people who abuse their power willingly and for their own benefit, and also at least as many people who know about it and silently tolerate it.” Alison Kuhn talks to BDE about The Case You, her documentary response to a horrific experience.

Mandy Chang, Commissioning Editor BBC Storyville, has been steeped in Forum projects this week, listening to pitches, holding one-on-one meetings and watching rough cuts. It’s all part of her ongoing quest to discover new doc gems that Storyville might board.

Adventurous new Swiss doc sales outfit Lightdox has added a new football hooligan title to a slate that already includes 5 IDFA titles and one in Docs for Sale. IDFA titles include Arica, which world prems in Frontlight, and Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria (in Best of Fests).

When lockdown began, industry misgivings were shared at newsreel archive British Pathé, which holds huge amounts of film material from 1896, the very start of cinema, to the early 1980s. Would anyone pay to license this material during such a difficult period? The answer was a resounding ‘yes’.

“As you know, Danish documentary makers tend to travel out into the world. They were challenged by the whole situation,” Cecilia Lidin, doc consultant at the Danish Film Institute, observes of how the local doc community reacted earlier this year when, thanks to the Corona lockdown, their wings were suddenly clipped.

Matti Paunio started his job as Head of Production at The Finnish Film Foundation in the autumn of last year. Then, the pandemic came. “As with everybody, this was a total surprise and changed a lot of things we had planned,” Paunio says of the sudden challenges posed by Covid-19.

Producer Emile Hertling Péronard has been taking his first steps into new media this week as part of the team pitching Thunder And Drum as a DocLab Forum Project.

Leading Belgian producer Hanne Phlypo of Clin d’Oeil Films has revealed further details of her hugely ambitious new project, Draw For Change!, a Forum selection in IDFA this week.

David France’s Welcome to Chechnya, which lifts the lid on rampant and violent homophobia in the Chechen Republic, is finding some of its biggest audiences in Russia via the BBC Russia service. However, as France told BDE, the film has also been pirated so heavily that it has been seen millions of times.