Geoffrey Macnab

French actress Romane Bohringer’s hybrid film is inspired by the book that French politician and MP Clémentine Autain wrote about her mother, the troubled French movie star Dominique Laffin. But the film began to take on a very personal dimension. At first, the director planned a conventional fictional adaptation. However, during the writing process, she kept on hearing her own story “knocking at the door,” she tells BDE.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells BDE of his scorching new feature documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 which launched in the Cannes Premiere section earlier this week.

In his feature doc debut, the return of independently-minded Déni Oumar Pitsaev to his home in Chechnya causes a family feud. His relatives all want him to get married and to go by traditional Chechen codes of family and masculinity. This was not always easy to record on film. “Some things that were more rough, raw, emotional and private I did not include in the film because it was too personal and my father was too vulnerable,” the director tells BDE.

Anna Berthollet of French-based doc sales outfit Lightdox talks to BDE about her Cannes slate. She also discusses her decision to move into theatrical distribution on some titles. “We understood that with some of the films, you don’t need to set up the big machine to release them. To get into classical distribution is immediately to trigger bigger expenses…but still these films can still have some kind of potential outside the festival circuit which we want to explore.”

There was big news in advance of today’s Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI) and Screen Scotland Docs-in-Progress showcase in the Cannes Marché. Oscar winner Emma Thompson was announced as exec producer of one of the projects being presented, Felipe Bustos Sierra’s new doc Everybody To Kenmure Street. Celebrating direct action, the rousing film tells the story of how neighbours and activists came together to surround an immigration van holding two residents from one of Scotland’s most diverse communities.

The Austrian-produced Militantropos, made by Ukrainian filmmakers Smith, Gorlova and Mozgovyi, attempts to capture the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the first part of an eventual trilogy. “The first film [is] about the transformation of a human within the war. The second film will speak much more about death and how death influences society, and the third will be about the connection between the war in Ukraine and the world outside,” Gorlova tells BDE.

In her new feature documentary Only on Earth, selected for DocsBarcelona Official Competition, Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Instead, she is at the heart of the inferno. “We are actually inside those fires,” the director extinguishes any idea that she and her team were staying back as the heat rose. She explains more to BDE.

Enric Miralles was the visionary Barcelona-born architect whose commissions included the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh and the Igualada Cemetery, famous for the way it seems to merge into the landscape. He died of a brain tumour aged only 45. The fact that he had died young and was buried within his own architecture touched director Maria Mauti emotionally. “From that moment it seemed to me that his life and his work were inextricably linked,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

In their film selected for DocsBarcelona Competition, Iranian filmmakers Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni chronicle the ebbs and flows in the life of their main protagonist, Sara Shahverdi, the motorcycling former midwife from a remote Iranian village who took the leap into local politics. “From the very beginning, we knew the motorcycle would be like an essential character in the film,” Khaki says, not least because it is a symbol of Sara’s freedom and her defiance.

The sport of table tennis (or ‘whiff whaff’ as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once famously called it) hasn’t been much covered by filmmakers. However, it spins firmly into view in Jonas Egert’s student diploma feature documentary, Ping Pong Paradise, a world premiere in Dok.Fest Munich. The director smashes back replies to questions served up by BDE.