Geoffrey Macnab

Producer George Chignell talks to Business Doc Europe about Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, an Oscar contender that was released in the US this autumn by Neon. Peck uses Orwell’s work, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, to look at the growth of authoritarianism today, everywhere from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russian, from Myanmar to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. “For me, it was a gift to work with a director like him,” Chignell says of her association with Peck.

“I struggled with addiction and depression for most of my young adult life,” filmmaker Ben Rekhi clarifies to BDE of one of his main motivations for making his Oscar-qualifying short, The Breakthrough Group. The 40-minute film looks in depth at the remarkable work of The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City, a programme providing care and “tough love” for those at the lowest ebb of drug or alcohol dependency.

Food Delivery, about the struggles of Filipino fishing folk, has won many plaudits, but is also facing down some heavy criticism – from the Chinese government. “I did not ask for this personally. Who would want to make a film that would go against a superpower like China?” director Baby Ruth Villarama reasons to BDE. “But where I was presented with the truth, the lived experience of our fisherfolk, the very people who are working in quiet dignity, and when I realised there are actual threats to our freedom and our food security, we had no choice but to embrace the story and to tell it as humanely as possible.”

The Tale of Silyan works on many levels. It tells the tale of an injured stork being nursed back to health by kindly farmer Nikola, while also highlighting the financial plight of the rural Macedonian farming communities. It is also a story of economic migration as Nikola’s wife, daughter and grandchild are forced to move to Germany. It furthermore recounts the myth of Silyan, a prodigal son who, after turning against his father, was turned into a stork. “This is a story I grew up with,” Kotevska tells BDE of Silyan’s punishment. “My grandparents told it to me while we were observing the storks as kids.”

In his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world-premiered at Sundance 2025 and is now competing for the Feature Doc Academy Award, Charlie Shackleton ruminates both over his abandoned investigation into a notorious (and unsolved) murder as well as the limitations of the true crime genre. “It does increasingly feel that absolutely the only thing you can get made is true crime or celebrity documentary. And it feels really suffocating,” Shackleton laments to BDE.

The picturesque southern town of the Natchez may well conjure up grand, elegiac associations, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll discover the place’s shameful history. While many within the white community still invoke the spirit of Gone With The Wind, both in how they dress and how they conduct themselves, it is Rev, a Black preacher, who shows visitors to the town the devastating legacy of human exploitation. Director Suzannah Herbert discusses her film with Business Doc Europe.

Ukrainian director Alina Maksimenko talks to Business Doc Europe about her feature documentary, in which she joins her mother and father in their village after the Russian invasion of February 24 2022. Also a painter, Maksimenko no longer turns to the canvas in order to express herself artistically. “As a painter, I love beautiful things: beautiful light, beautiful streets, I love light in the air. I used to bring beauty into my paintings. But this beauty just became impossible from the beginning of the war.”

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the framework for his film One to One: John & Yoko. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells Business Doc Europe of his scorching feature doc Orwell: 2+2=5, a strong awards contender.

Director Eugene Jarecki, Stella Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson reflect on Jarecki’s documentary which analyses the treatment meted out to journalist and whistle-blower Julian Assange by numerous governments, including those of the UK and US. “I think there is a story here that is so explosive for the public, so revealing and so much about today, that there is going to be a massive appetite for it.” Jarecki says of his film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes 2025, and is now an awards front-runner.