Geoffrey Macnab

Business Doc Europe interviews Isa Willinger, one of seven German film talents selected for German Films’ Face to Face showcase of February 16. In her recent feature doc No Mercy (2025), sold by Cinephil, Willinger interviewed a series of other female filmmakers who inspire her today. “Film is really a more popular medium,” says the former academic. “For me, it was always important to communicate with an audience - and not just a super tiny niche audience.”

Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta could not understand why her mother, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2015, would talk so much about tigers, even though she had never mentioned seeing one before her illness. But after hearing the story of the eponymous US Flying Tiger planes that were operational in the Himalayas during WW2, things began to fall into place for Dutta, at which point she was inspired to embark on a genre-defying study of memory, war and infrastructure. Dutta discusses her new film with BDE.

Patric Chiha’s inspiration for his new documentary, selected for Berlin Panorama, came in September 2022 when he first saw images of young Russians crossing the border in Georgia, fleeing the Putin regime. “They were facing a situation I could not imagine. Their faces seemed to say a lot about their fragility, and the violence of our world,” the director reflects to Business Doc Europe.

The short documentary The Devil Is Busy comprises a day in the life of Tracii, the head of security at a women's healthcare clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, who works tirelessly to protect the women who are forced to fight through protesters to receive their abortion care. “We wanted to take people through what it means to be in the positions of the staff, the women who are working in this clinic day in and day out, because they are really on the front line of what has turned into a battle,” co-director Gandbhir states. “With many of the protesters outside, it’s like a holy war.”

Reading through her teenage diaries reminded director Angelica Ruffier of a romantic obsession she once developed for her history teacher. That memory forms the basis of her new feature doc, selected for IFFR Tiger Competition. “The really difficult part was to read them now…” she tells BDE of a sense of shame she felt when she first looked back over the old notebooks. However, she soon realised that what she had written was, in fact, frank and accurate, a record of “pure” experience.

In his new doc series, the first part of which world-premieres in Sundance Episodic, Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard chronicles the decade-long legal battle between the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev over the enormous mark-ups that Bouvier applied to the sales. “I trust neither of them and never trusted them. They play a billion-dollar game that complicates things for everyone,” Dalsgaard tells BDE.

For 10 years, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes followed Isra’a and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, as they were forced to navigate war, exile and emotional anguish. As we see in the film, selected for Sundance World Documentary Competition, characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” co-director MacInnes tells Business Doc Europe.

Mark Cousins is back in Sundance with yet another magnum opus, this time telling the history of the doc genre. Park City will present the first part of what will eventually be a 16-hour odyssey. Cousins’ “impulse” was to communicate to audiences his own sense of wonder about all the documentaries that have enraptured him over the years. “The magic is out there. There’s a world outside ourselves which is so complex - a full spectrum of everything we can imagine - the joys and sorrows of being alive,” he tells BDE.

Fergie Chambers may be one of the richest people in America, but he’s also a Marxist revolutionary who lives without any visible trappings of extreme wealth. During the course of Sinéad O’Shea’s film he also becomes a Muslim. “It’s so interesting that someone who comes from one of America’s wealthiest families has decided to rebel against the capitalist system and is intent on creating a communist revolution,” O’Shea tells BDE.

Selected for Sundance World Cinema Documentary Comp and sold by Dogwoof, Birds of War tells the story of the love affair between a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman. It was a romance which began in extraordinarily unlikely circumstances, in the shadow of war and upheaval. Filmmakers Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak talk to Business Doc Europe.