Geoffrey Macnab

In his new documentary, Spanish filmmaker Miguel Eek not only investigates what motivated revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) to liberate Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from the Portuguese yoke, he also reveals the man behind the myth. “This was a man who could be involved in high profile diplomatic discussions at the United Nations and, at the same time, he was writing a letter to his wife about the beauty of the camels in the desert,” Eek tells Business Doc Europe.

Dutch visual artist Jeroen Kooijmans discusses his debut feature doc which is both therapeutic and loving, and dedicated to fellow artist Elspeth Diederix, the 30-year+ love of his life, and the muse behind the film. “In the first three and a half years when I was starting this project, basically I wanted to make a portrait of her. I wanted to make a love letter for her as a surprise. I also didn't want to tell her because I was afraid she wouldn't like it, and would censor a lot of footage,” Kooijmans confides.

Filmmakers Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel spent seven years making their new feature documentary, an intimate epic set almost entirely within the confines of the ex-Kartli sanatorium in Tbilisi, Georgia, which became home to 200 displaced families. “We had this feeling of the building as a personality with its own character and mood,” Kalandadze says. “The key to understand how these people live, and what they do all day was also to study the building itself, all the stairs and balconies.”

Aiste Žegulytė has a fascination for change and decay…and mould. In her new documentary, world-premiering in Amsterdam, the director immerses herself in the world of these microscopic spore-producing structures. The film is particularly cinematic, both in terms of style and content. “It was important for me to create a metaphor of how mould eats our memories, our visual memory,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “So I was looking for mouldy tapes, and unexpectedly found some super beautifully mouldy archives from a documentary chronicle of my dad's hometown in Lithuania.”

In the Synthetic Sincerity lab, researchers are looking to inject authenticity into AI characters, using folk from Isaacs’ own documentaries to do so. In return, they allow Isaacs to film the process. The film may be hi-tech in concept, but decidedly low in budget. “I made this film for £8,000. There is something about the independence that gives you,” Isaacs tells BDE.

When folk at Sundance 2025 went to see Ryan White’s new doc, grief and death were presented in a way they simply weren’t expecting…with bucket-loads of humour. Which is why the film won the Festival Favourite Award. Come See Me In The Good Light, which tells the story of how poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley confront Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis, was originally suggested to White by producer and comedian, Tig Notaro. “Tig said ‘Andrea is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known in my entire life,’” the director tells BDE, “and I think there’s this opportunity to subvert the typical terminal illness genre.’”

Pippi Longstocking would not have existed without the Second World War. This is one of the assertions made in Wilfried Hauke’s remarkable new feature documentary, A World Gone Mad, that received its world premiere in Lübeck this week. “[She] becomes a star after the Second World War in Sweden and Germany because the readers could feel there is a humanistic, moral power integrated in this figure of Pippi which is, of course, against the ugly power of dictators and their authoritarianism.” Hauke tells BDE.

In 1919, the flamboyant, some say narcissistic, politician Gabriele D’Annunzio staged a coup in the Croatian port town of Rijeka, and thereafter ruled for 16 months. In his new film, Igor Bezinović tells the story of this tumultuous period via archive and recreations staged with local people, with a variety of amateur actors playing D’Annunzio. “To tackle D’Annunzio’s madness, you have to be as passionate about it [the story] as him,” Bezinović tells BDE.

In Active Vocabulary, Russian teacher Maria is denounced after she criticizes, in class, the Russian War in Ukraine. After fleeing the country for Germany, she ingeniously sets out to re-enact the incident with pupils in her new Berlin class. “This village where Maria comes from is so remote from the front lines, so far away, and yet there is apparently this very strong ideological presence of the state that made them [her former pupils] behave this way, or is setting the rules.”

Top archive producer and footage researcher Elizabeth Klinck fills in Business Doc Europe on this year’s DOK Archive Market, to be held October 30. “It’s wonderful to have both private and public/commercial archives altogether under one roof,” she underlines how the market has become a must-attend event for the sector. “I think DOK Leipzig is right up there and I am always so impressed by the quality of the programming that GRAP (German Researchers and Archive Producers Association) puts together from within their membership base.”