Geoffrey Macnab

For his new feature doc, Swiss/American filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe turns once more to Hollywood, this time profiling Kim Novak, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid. The director thinks audiences will be surprised by Novak’s openness and generosity of spirit. “She reveals aspects of herself she has never revealed before. There is an incredible amount of vulnerability. That’s all credit to her. She took a massive leap of faith.”

“Because I am alive!” Alexander Sokurov replies quietly to Business Doc Europe when asked what led him to embark on his monumental new, five-hour long archive-based documentary, Director’s Diary. In the film, sold by Films Boutique and a world premiere Out of Competition in Venice, the 74-year-old Russian director takes viewers on an epic but very personal journey through late Soviet history.

He may have been sentenced in absentia to eight and a half years in jail by the Russian authorities, but Ukrainian producer and director Alexander Rodnyansky continues to work while in exile in LA, where he made his new feature documentary world premiering at Venice 2025. “It is a story of an unending conflict but of a deep, enduring hope that one day the war will end,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “This is what the film is about. I believe this experience is shared by many, many families around the globe.”

HBO’s Hanka Kastelicová and Tereza Bóna Keilová filled in BDE at Sarajevo 2025 on company activities in the CEE region. HBO Max has a huge global footprint, available in around 70 languages and the service continues to open in ever more territories. “One thing that never changes is that HBO is a synonym for quality,” Kastelicová insists to BDE that the company’s rapid growth hasn’t compromised standards.

In their new feature doc, world-premiering at Edinburgh FF and the only doc in competition, Swedish filmmakers Alexander Rynéus and Per Bifrost return to the sinking town of Malmberget, built on top of a huge iron mine. “I think we will always continue filming in Malmberget in one way or another. I think it’s some kind of life calling,” Bifrost says of the magnetic pull of the disappearing town.

Italian filmmaker Parsifal Reparato’s new feature doc She (sold by CAT&Docs and premiering in Locarno’s Critics Week) exposes the shameful exploitation of women workers in Vietnam’s booming electronics industry. One irony noted by Reparato is that Vietnam is generally viewed as a dictatorship, under the one-party control of the Communists. Yet, when it comes to personal freedom, “the biggest problem is from the corporates,” he tells BDE.

The last penal colonies in Europe are in Sardinia, as evidenced in the Locarno selection Nella Colonia Penale, directed by Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia and Alberto Diana. The film was shot by female DOP Federica Ortu. “It was something also that was interesting, to have the cinematography led by a woman cinematographer inside a so-deep masculine world. I think it gives something more to the film,” co-director Diana reflects.

Folk music has held a deeply ambivalent place within Irish culture over the last 100 years, since the end of British colonial rule. As Dennis Harvey and Lars Loven point out early on in their feature doc Celtic Utopia (a world premiere in Locarno’s critics' week), it has come to "incarnate the contradictions of the island: rebellion, conservative Catholicism, nostalgia for a future unrealised.” The directors get musical with BDE.

In his new film, Norwegian Audun Amundsen immerses himself in the murky world of money-making online gurus. Click The Link Below, a premiere at New Zealand’s Doc Edge and sold by Sideways Film, profiles some of these internet marketeers who promise immense and instant wealth and success to those who buy their often eye-wateringly expensive online courses. Amundsen explains more to BDE.

Daan Veldhuizen discusses his urgent new documentary, receiving its international premiere in the festival’s Edge of Impact category, about how, after after transferring control of their former colony West Papua to Indonesia in 1962, the Dutch set in motion years of genocidal violence against the West Papuan people. “I’ve always felt that Dutch culture is not completely honest about its own role in the world and about its historical relevance,” Veldhuizen comments.