Geoffrey Macnab

When he read a newspaper article in 2018 about matchmaking between North Korean refugee women and South Korean men, Norwegian Morten Traavik was immediately fascinated. “[But] being very much of an outsider linguistically, culturally, I needed somebody who could be the bridge to the subject of the film; someone not only bilingual but with a built-in cultural understanding of both worlds,” he explains to BDE as to why he turned to his eventual co-director Sun Kim.

Ukrainian co-director Mila Teshaieva talks to BDE about her and Marcus Lenz’s return to the protagonists of their highly lauded 2022 documentary When Spring Came to Bucha. “I was trying as much as I could [to make] a film that would not only speak about the dark side,” she says. “At the same time, I think our film is very honest, strikingly, strikingly honest about those very normal lives touched by war and broken into pieces.”

The song Agadoo was just about as bad as it gets, an opinion that many people also formed about Black Lace, the band that sang it. Frontman Dene Michael Betteridge has probably sung it more than 20,000 times, director Kim Hopkins tells BDE of the group’s willing subject of her touching new doc Still Pushing Pineapples, which opens the 32nd Sheffield DocFest. Would he appear in a warts-and-all account of his life, she asked him at the beginning of the process. Absolutely, was the answer. “I think he has the philosophy that all publicity is good publicity,” Hopkins says.

Directors Mocanu and Dragolea follow charismatic environmental activist Tiberiu Boșutar as he tries to stop illegal (and highly lucrative) logging in Romania’s forests. “Our way of dealing with issues [in Romania] is a tragic-comical way,” says Dragolea. “We have a saying that you laugh and you cry…we didn’t search for the humour but the humour was just there for us to uncover with our camera.”

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 in competition at Krakow FF) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.

When journalist Lina Vdovîi, estranged from her violent father, agrees to help him expose the injustices perpetrated by previous employer, the process reopens the wounds of their past relationship. Nevertheless the experience also proves to be cathartic. Making the film convinced her that “running away” from him wasn’t “healing the wounds from your past,” she tells BDE. She was, instead, giving herself a chance to make peace with him.

Yes, Gar O’Rourke did himself try the mud treatment when he was preparing his new feature doc Sanatorium (selected for Documentary Competition at KFF and sold by MetFilm Sales). He has also done the salt pools the electro-massages and everything else between. Many docs have been made in Ukraine since the invasion but this is surely the gentlest, funniest and most surprising. O’Rourke gets the full treatment from BDE.

Iga Lis’ feature doc profiles Miecia, the woman who runs the smokehouse in the Polish seaside town of Leba that provides, quite simply, the best fish that the director has ever tasted. Lis grew equally fond of the smokehouse owner and her staff. “I found it impossible not to form relationships with those people,” she tells BDE. “At a certain point, I found myself caring deeply about them - and they cared deeply about me.”

Ana Alice de Morais, Artistic Co-Director at RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Festival, and Marc Gauthier, Executive Director, reflected to BDE on their 2025 Cannes Docs experience. “This was our sixth Docs In Progress [in Cannes] in seven years,” Gauthier said of what is now becoming almost an annual event. “Cannes Docs has really managed to create a home for creative documentary…it’s a special thing in this global madness.”

Swedish master Widerberg is on the verge of rediscovery and reappraisal. That is certainly the hope of renowned Swedish film critic Jon Asp and industry veteran Mattias Nohrborg (founder of arthouse distributor TriArt Film). “The relevance of the films today is fascinating,” Nohrborg tells Business Doc Europe. “His films seems so new and fresh and modern.”