Geoffrey Macnab

Using footage shot by inmates themselves on cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman show how squalor, violence and degradation have become commonplace in American jails. At the heart of the documentary is Robert Earl, a long-term prisoner with little chance of parole who has become a leader and spokesperson for the other inmates. “I do feel when we talk to him, it’s as if we are talking to Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben island,” Jarecki tells BDE of their campaigning doc.

Six years ago, Susana de Sousa Dias (IDFA’s Guest of Honour in 2025) first started research into the so-called “ghost town” left behind when Henry Ford’s rubber factory in the Brazilian Amazon closed down in the early 20th Century. Fordlândia Panacea is her second film on the subject. There is a familiar narrative about Fordlândia, as the haunted utopia that Henry Ford left behind. De Sousa Dias believes this is a crudely reductive vision of a place that has a far more complex history. “It was neither a Utopian project, and nor is it a ghost town,” the director insists to BDE.

Silent Flood, which has just won the Best Cinematography Award in IDFA International Competition, and is sold by Filmotor, isn’t a film in a hurry. Ukrainian Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk is telling the story of a closed religious community based in rural west Ukraine. Life is quiet and peaceful - or at least would be if it weren’t for the constant floods and the wars that have bedevilled the area. And then came the full-scale Russian invasion…The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Ethiopian-Israeli Mazal Tazazo survived the Nova festival massacre in southern Israel on October 7 2023 in circumstances that seem close to miraculous. Her story is told in This is NOT a Movie Script, a short film screening online this week as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival. Made by London-based Joëlle Bentolila at Chimaera Films, it is intended as the first in a series of stories that will be put together in feature documentary form. Bentolila talks to Business Doc Europe.

Iraqi filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour has never forgotten the sudden disappearance of her 10-year old friend, Nour. That incident has gnawed away at her for years, even as she has become a very successful filmmaker, producer and actor. She returns to the incident in her haunting debut feature-length documentary, Flana, whose title is Iraqi slang for a forgotten woman - and that’s precisely what Nour was to become. Ghandour discusses her film with BDE.

The Russian filmmaker discusses Trillion, his new and critically lauded documentary, and the second film in his ‘empathy’ trilogy, with Business Doc Europe. The film features, throughout, a mysterious woman who walks barefoot across the coastal terrain, again and again casting a very particular essence into the sea. “From the second I met her, I thought what she does is extraordinary,” Kossakovsky says of the woman whose identity he still refuses to disclose.

In Sien Versteyhe’s new documentary we watch a therapy session within a care centre for survivors of sexual violence. The woman in the film may be traumatised and vulnerable but she is tough, the director underlines. “We are talking more and more about sexual violence, but that we are talking about it in the wrong way,” she tells BDE. “I still feel that. In the stories we see or hear, the perpetrator is almost always the man in the bushes, the monster, and the survivor is always weak. We’re not getting any further than the image of a weak victim in a shower…that’s not the reality.”

Gianluca Matarrese’s I Want Her Dead is a film about enmity, specifically about two middle-aged women, and both cousins of the director, who simply can’t stand one another. And, no, it wasn’t cathartic or healing for them to have the chance to yell insults so spectacularly. “They still hate each other,” the director tells BDE. “It wasn’t therapeutic at all…but they’re expressing everything they wanted to express.”

Wouter Jansen’s Vienna-based Square Eyes is in IDFA this year with half a dozen films in official selection, both long-form and shorts. Feature docs include The Kartli Kingdom by Georgian directors Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel in International Competition, the Ukrainian Militantropos by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi in Best of Fests, and Maureen Fazendeiro’s Portuguese doc The Seasons which receives its Dutch premiere in Paradocs. Jansen talks docs with BDE.

The prolific Dutch filmmaker is back at IDFA, this time with a film that tackles the difficult topic of psychosis. Several of Bouwmann's protagonists mentioned that, during their psychotic periods, they felt “as if they were in a movie.” Some of their insights are also subversive, suggesting that, at such moments, they’re also experiencing life in a heightened fashion, and that going back to “ordinary reality” seems monotonous and anticlimactic by comparison. “Euphoria and deep insights can be part of psychosis,” he says.