Geoffrey Macnab

Julia Loktev’s new film begins just two days after its predecessor (My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow) ended, the point at which the last remaining independent media outfits in Russia were shut down. Some of the journalists head to Istanbul, others to Israel or Georgia. Some ended up in Prague or Vienna. “History happened and I kept shooting directly, when everybody fled Russia. I followed them and I just kept shooting,” Loktev tells BDE. “I had this incredible opportunity to capture this historic moment as it was happening.”

In her new doc, world-premiering in Venice before its North American premiere at TIFF, the revered double-Oscar winner is back on the picket line, focusing on the UPS drivers, Amazon employees and app-based bike delivery workers who are keeping the city of New York ticking over. Their working conditions, however, are often deplorable. “It’s a world where the ‘deliveristas’ have absolutely nothing. They have to buy their gloves, their motorcycles or their bikes. Beyond that, they have to look over their shoulders now to make sure that ICE is not trailing them,” Kopple tells BDE.

Filmmakers Vasarhelyi and Chin discuss their audacious new feature doc in which mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson plan to climb, together with Chin, the North Face of Mount Everest, before skiing back down the way they came. “You can shape and define your fate to a certain degree. We all think that as humans we get to decide everything. We don’t,” Chin tells BDE. “There is only so much you can control…”

Sophie Fiennes is back with her latest Pervert’s Guide, once again made with the maverick Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and movie lover, Slavoj Zizek. “I think the absurd is something he embraces,” Fiennes says of Zizek’s freewheeling approach. “It’s a reflection of him being a person who is an outsider, a free thinker - and the deadpan comedy of it is particular to him. I never know what is going to happen when I put him in those situations. I have no idea. It’s an experiment.”

Veteran Israeli artist and director Amos Gitai returns to Venice with his latest feature documentary, The Road to Jericho, a poetic meditation on conflict in the Middle East and the diminishing prospects for peace. The director tells Business Doc Europe how he regards culture as “one of the only channels which is remaining to create a dialogue.” That is why he so opposes cultural boycotts. “If you block any form of dialogue, then, OK, let’s go to the next war. I think channels of dialogue always should remain open.”

UK director Louise Lockwood discusses her new feature doc Bel, which closes EIFF on August 19 and which profiles the prodigiously talented Kenyan-Scottish artist-musician-singer Beldina Odenyo who took her own life in 2021. “What an utter tragedy that that talent has been stopped. It’s obviously heart-breaking for the family, a human loss, but that raw, raw talent was totally the same. Bel and Amy [Winehouse] were very similar in that respect,” Lockwood tells BDE.

Dutch producer Renko Douze discusses Ukrainian Helena Maksyom’s feature doc Don't Ask Me If I Killed, sold by Esther van Messel’s First Hand Films, that chronicles the director’s life as a soldier in defence of her country. “It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and a very human perspective on the frontline,” Douze says of the film, receiving its International Premiere in Sarajevo Documentary Competition.

Filmed over 25 years, Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s feature documentary, sold by Autlook, follows Guille and Belinda, two inseparable cousins growing up on neighbouring farms in Argentina’s Pampas. "To me, they were just the centre of the universe - and I think that comes through in the work too. If you stop and pay attention to the smallest things, you can make them the centre of the world.” the director tells BDE of her feature debut, world-premiering in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present Competition.

Ukrainian soldiers Shakhta, Potter and Dancer have a very close relationship with death, having returned to the front-line after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “People at war accept [the possibility of] their own death and it really changes you,” Hontaruk elaborates to BDE on the title of her feature documentary, selected for Karlovy Vary. “This transformation is really important and powerful inside a person. It is a key to this film. You need to find your desire to live - and life is stronger than death.”

There is an intriguing absence at the heart of Rosa Friedrich’s hybrid documentary My Friend the Porn Star (screening in Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and sold by New Docs). The director’s friend, the would-be porn star Timo, decided late on during the project that he didn’t want to appear in it any more. Undaunted, Friedrich took the bold decision to keep his body but to use AI to replace his face with that of another man. The director explains more to BDE.