Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.”