Geoffrey Macnab

In her feature documentary, world-premiering in Lisbon, Inês Oliveira profiles the prolific stills photographer Mariana Viegas who worked on the sets of some of Portugal’s most revered filmmakers, such as Šarūnas Bartas, Pedro Costa and Manoel de Oliveira. “These were films that marked me, they are still important films for me,” Oliveira observes to BDE, and describes Viegas’ photos as “somehow like a time machine,” giving viewers new perspectives on the important work of these major auteurs.

“I’ve always been fascinated by - and have often wondered about - the extent to which the places we live, and the cycles of nature that surround us, influence who we are and who we become,” Ribeiro tells Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which have now led her to make Vent du matin (a world premiere in Portuguese competition at Doclisboa), a film that unfolds over a year within the vineyards of Beaujolais.

Rayna Teneva grew up in Kazanluk, a Bulgarian town famous for its arms factory, Arsenal AD, and for its rose oil, made from flowers picked in Bulgaria’s “rose valley.” The artist and filmmaker, who is now based in Vienna, isn’t therefore surprised that her feature Geography Is Destiny (an international premiere in Doclisboa’s International Competition) is so often described as being about “guns and roses.” Nonetheless, as she tells BDE, she hopes audiences will see beyond such an obvious cliché.

Doclisboa’s Marina Thomé discusses this year’s offer to international professionals attending Nebulae, the festival’s industry programme that kicks off October 16. “Success, for us, is creating an environment where filmmakers can develop author-driven projects that challenge cinematic form and language, while creating spaces for reflection through roundtables, conversations with festival programmers, training activities, labs and live cinema performances,” she underlines to BDE.

Doclisboa (15-25 October) is one of the first events in a packed autumn season for documentary markets and festivals that also includes Ji.hlava, DOK Leipzig and, a few weeks later, IDFA. Festival director Hélder Beja argues, however, that the Lisbon footprint is very different to those of the other events. “We truly defend and believe in film above all,” Beja tells BDE. “We have gone a little bit away from the term ‘documentary’ these days, even if we have it in the name of our festival. ‘Documentary’ is a word that very rarely appears in everything that we write.”

The top-level panel invited documentary experts and filmmakers to share their experiences of handling artistic and production challenges in their use of archival footage. Moderated by Sheffield DocFest Creative Director Raul Niño Zambrano, the panel comprised Nanette Burstein, director of Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff; Rafael Guendelman, director of Az Zeeb; Simon McCallum, producer (Archive & Industry) at the BFI National Archive, and Theo Rollason, director of Queer Edward II.

World-premiering in Utrecht, Joeri Pruys’s Final Cut looks at how the provocative TV show Body Art, made by Pruys’s father in the 1970s and starring the then little-known Serbian artist Marina Abramović, turned into one of the most notorious cases in the history of Dutch censorship. “The rules around who is actually the owner of this material are very vague,” Pruys tells BDE. “That is why in the film I am also saying it is my heritage, so I should be able to do with it whatever I want, because my father created this. It’s Marina’s work as well, so she should be free to use it.”

Oscar-winning US director Alex Gibney talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the September 30 UK release of Knife, about the shocking onstage attack on Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022. “He comes out of all of this learning all sorts of life lessons and not being mired in bitterness, resentment and hate,” Gibney observes of Rushdie. “He was certainly haunted and debilitated mentally by the attack, and he had to get that strength back. The only way he knew to do it was to push through.”

Afsaneh Salari’s new feature documentary Tehran, Under the Skin scrapes away at a side of Iranian life you won’t see in many other documentaries, namely the booming world of cosmetic surgery. Thousands of Iranian women every year are heading to surgeries to get noses sculpted, stomachs tucked, breasts lifted or skin tightened. The film, sold by CAT&Docs, has its world premiere in TIFF Lightbox this weekend. Director Salari talks to BDE.

In a film that has as many plot twists as any fictional movie, a kidnapping at sea splits a Yemeni family apart, as a mother’s fight for survival reveals the human cost of Europe’s border regime. Director Sine Plambech emphasises to BDE that this is “not an activist film… I see it as an artistic documentation of a human rights violation - but definitely I want people to watch it and say ‘is this a good idea, to continue to outsource the border responsibilities to countries with conflicts and war and militia and weapons? Does that live up to our European values?”