Geoffrey Macnab

When Jona Honer first visited China, he soon worked out that the easiest way to connect with the young and extremely affluent sub-strata of Chinese society was through their favourite nightclubs. He was also fascinated by the rituals of capitalism, which resembled more a religion in terms of its structure and the social support it offered. “They [the club goers] create their own symbols, maybe without knowing it consciously,” Honer tells BDE. “Every religion has its own symbols. They create their own value system…it’s more than a night out.”

In his new documentary, Tom Fassaert returns to the subject of his family, this time the strained but fascinating relationship between his father Rob and uncle Rene, two men who seem to be polar opposites. “They can’t live without each other and yet when they’re together….” Fassaert sighs as he reflects on the odd couple dynamic between the brothers. “The bittersweet taste - that is what made me make this film.”

Scottish author Irvine Welsh is put under the microscope in Paul Sng’s new documentary, which closed Edinburgh FF last month and which will be released in UK cinemas on September 26. “It was having Irvine walk through his memories…Irvine has appeared in a lot of adaptations of his work but I think he gives his best performance in this one,” director Sng tells BDE. He is joined in interview by exec producer Sarah Drummond.

In the hybrid film Memory, Vladlena Sandu, a survivor of the war in Chechnya, studies her traumatic memories in order to transcend and transform them via cinema. “The bad memories, I have a chance to look at them - and I feel myself more calm,” she explains to Business Doc Europe how it helps her to confront the demons from her childhood through her art. Her hope with her filmmaking is to try to break “the circle of violence” that has for so long surrounded her.

Leading Argentine director Lucrecia Martel takes the plunge into documentary with her latest feature, a complex and hard-hitting story about the murder of an Indigenous community leader and the community’s subsequent fight for justice on his behalf. “It is very important to convey to young people that filmmaking and cinema can have a huge power,” Martel tells Business Doc Europe. “They can use it for good or bad reasons but it has a huge power - and I’ve never felt it so much as in this film.”

Revered US director Ross McElwee’s new documentary is a deeply painful exploration of his relationship with his son, Adrian, who died suddenly in late 2016 after a drugs overdose. “It has the opposite effect of therapy. It makes me more anxious about living,” McElwee tells Business Doc Europe, when asked if making the film was a cathartic experience. In the case of Remake, there is “no consolation that I can fathom at this point: no consolation in making this film, little consolation in actually working on it.”

Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras tells Business Doc Europe.

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.”