Geoffrey Macnab

David Borenstein talks to BDE about his extraordinary feature doc, co-directed with Pavel "Pasha" Talankin, a Russian teacher who secretly documents his small town school's transformation into a war recruitment center during the Ukraine invasion. “To see the road he has taken in the last year and a half, will I ever see something like that again in my life? I don’t know…it is dramatic! That has been a joy to me,” Borenstein marvels at how the softly spoken former teacher has transformed his life.

Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Ladkani’s Yanuni profiles the remarkable Juma Xipaia, an Indigenous leader from the Xipaya people in Brazil who, in her early 20s, became the first woman chief in the Middle Xingu region, and who has campaigned ferociously to protect her community in the Amazon from exploitation by miners, foresters and anyone else looking to pollute and destroy the ecosystem. “If we lose the Amazon, then we will all lose,” the director tells BDE.

Business Doc Europe talks to Liat Beinin Atzili, the eponymous subject of Brandon Kramer’s Oscar shorted-listed Holding Liat, which follows Liat’s family after her abduction during the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks. “It is possible for me as an individual to go through the experience that I went through but still believe in other people and believe that there can be kindness,” she tells BDE. “People can still hang on to their humanity even in very, very difficult situations.” Liat is joined in interview by the director.

Mariska Hargitay’s Oscar-contending HBO-backed documentary is a deeply personal and clearly cathartic venture in which the filmmaker tries to make sense of her relationship with someone about whom she has only the most fleeting recollections - her mother, Jayne Mansfield. It was a film Hargitay made with the blessing of her siblings. “Not only did they trust me but, at the end, they all shared how healing and how cathartic it was for them. I told them I am making this movie for us,” she tells BDE.

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and an Oscar contender) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.

Third Act (which premiered in Sundance) is an intimate and loving portrait of Robert A. Nakamura, the pioneering Japanese-American filmmaker often called “The Godfather of Asian American film,” who died earlier this summer. “Initially, we set out just to make a simple biography of my dad, a portrait of an artist celebrating his achievements and career,” Tadashi Nakamura tells BDE. “But anyone could make that biopic. What is the film that only I could make, as his son, in that moment? That was an open-ended question and the challenge.”

In American Sons, director Andrew James Gonzales follows a brotherhood of Marines a decade after their deployment to Afghanistan, as they struggle to overcome the trauma of combat and the loss of their best friend, Corporal JV Villarreal. “It goes back to what Charles Dickens said in A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” the director tells BDE. “Even though it was horrible, it was also the greatest experience they’ve ever had…the love you have for someone who you’re willing to die for and who is willing to die for you, we cannot imagine.”

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.”