Geoffrey Macnab

HBO’s Hanka Kastelicová and Tereza Bóna Keilová filled in BDE at Sarajevo 2025 on company activities in the CEE region. HBO Max has a huge global footprint, available in around 70 languages and the service continues to open in ever more territories. “One thing that never changes is that HBO is a synonym for quality,” Kastelicová insists to BDE that the company’s rapid growth hasn’t compromised standards.

In their new feature doc, world-premiering at Edinburgh FF and the only doc in competition, Swedish filmmakers Alexander Rynéus and Per Bifrost return to the sinking town of Malmberget, built on top of a huge iron mine. “I think we will always continue filming in Malmberget in one way or another. I think it’s some kind of life calling,” Bifrost says of the magnetic pull of the disappearing town.

Italian filmmaker Parsifal Reparato’s new feature doc She (sold by CAT&Docs and premiering in Locarno’s Critics Week) exposes the shameful exploitation of women workers in Vietnam’s booming electronics industry. One irony noted by Reparato is that Vietnam is generally viewed as a dictatorship, under the one-party control of the Communists. Yet, when it comes to personal freedom, “the biggest problem is from the corporates,” he tells BDE.

The last penal colonies in Europe are in Sardinia, as evidenced in the Locarno selection Nella Colonia Penale, directed by Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia and Alberto Diana. The film was shot by female DOP Federica Ortu. “It was something also that was interesting, to have the cinematography led by a woman cinematographer inside a so-deep masculine world. I think it gives something more to the film,” co-director Diana reflects.

Folk music has held a deeply ambivalent place within Irish culture over the last 100 years, since the end of British colonial rule. As Dennis Harvey and Lars Loven point out early on in their feature doc Celtic Utopia (a world premiere in Locarno’s critics' week), it has come to "incarnate the contradictions of the island: rebellion, conservative Catholicism, nostalgia for a future unrealised.” The directors get musical with BDE.

In his new film, Norwegian Audun Amundsen immerses himself in the murky world of money-making online gurus. Click The Link Below, a premiere at New Zealand’s Doc Edge and sold by Sideways Film, profiles some of these internet marketeers who promise immense and instant wealth and success to those who buy their often eye-wateringly expensive online courses. Amundsen explains more to BDE.

Daan Veldhuizen discusses his urgent new documentary, receiving its international premiere in the festival’s Edge of Impact category, about how, after after transferring control of their former colony West Papua to Indonesia in 1962, the Dutch set in motion years of genocidal violence against the West Papuan people. “I’ve always felt that Dutch culture is not completely honest about its own role in the world and about its historical relevance,” Veldhuizen comments.

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.