Geoffrey Macnab

For his new feature doc, director Stefan Sick spent two years following his four troubled subjects - Leni, Eleyna, Lena and Lisann - within a residential home, shooting over a period of 80 days. Neither a parent or a care worker, Sick was able to gain the girls’ trust from the word go. “I was something in-between. That allowed for a special kind of connection …they are often starved of recognition. For a while, during shooting, I was able to offer them exactly that.”

The famous 1923 children’s novel, King Matt the First by Janusz Korczak, was a book that director Jaśmina Wójcik hated as a little girl. But during the pandemic, her two young daughters became huge fans of it. The strange sense of isolation felt by the young king in the book chimed with what children across Poland were feeling during lockdown. “Nature gave them this opportunity to have space,” the director tells BDE of the new feelings of liberation that Zoja and Lea were experiencing.

Concealed within the foundations of Julietta Singh’s childhood home in Manitoba are the stories of women who have lived there in previous times and who have, over many years, confronted colonialism, racism, sexism and ableism. “It [the house] was a repository of some very difficult experiences and memories for our family,” co-director Singh, whose The Nest world-premieres at Hot Docs, tells BDE.

Throughout its 96-minute running time, Noam Gonick’s feature doc touches on everything from the persecution and marginalisation of gays and lesbians in the Canada of the 1950s and 1960s to Black Lives Matter and the emergence of the “two spirit” movement among gay Indigenous communities. Featuring a treasure trove of archival material, the film also “takes advantage in a gracious way” of Canada’s rich history of activist filmmaking, the director tells BDE. “We wanted to get their material back out there on screen.”

UK producer Roy Boulter talks to BDE about directing his debut feature Algorithm Party, an adaptation of the book of the same name, in which fiery Liverpool author and spoken word performer “Roy” (real name PJ Smith, and no relation to Boulter) narrates a series of raw, scabrously funny and sometimes very violent tales dealing with drugs, alcohol and domestic abuse - partly drawn from his own experiences growing up in Toxteth.

Lulu Scott’s new feature doc Where Two Oceans Meet (a world premiere in Nyon) looks very closely at the life of a family in Mitchells Plain, a township not far from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Kulsum Orrie and her two children are waiting patiently for the release of her husband, Phadiel, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence. 30 years after the end of the Apartheid, Kulsum is still enduring her own separation. Director Scott talks to BDE.

Roland Edzard’s new documentary, world-premiering in Nyon, takes us into the heart of the Central Sahara Gold Rush. The director asks his characters to re-enact their own story. “The movie in itself is a documentary because it is real people in a real situation and it’s real life,” he tells BDE. “But it’s a documentary that I did like fiction…I didn’t want to explain but to be inside [the story]. I can say it is done like a fiction [film] because I say ‘action’ and I say ‘cut.’”

“I wouldn’t say it was exactly a carte blanche, but it was close to it,” Montreal-based director Sophie Bédard Marcotte says of the freedom given to her by backers National Film Board of Canada when she embarked on I Lost Sight Of The Landscape (a world premiere in Burning Lights at VdR this week). In the film, Marcotte turns her camera on her playwright neighbour as he develops his latest work within an artist co-operative.

Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas. This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. It’s also where Julien Elie went to make his new feature doc, Shifting Baselines. Alongside the footage of the space rockets, the documentary also includes imagery of nature. “Seeing those beautiful birds just flying by those rockets is really sad,” director Julien Elie tells BDE. “It is painful to see this. You wonder what we are doing now…it was a unique place, Boca Chica, but it is not anymore.”

For years, Indigenous American Al Moon had been contemplating attending one of the annual reunions of the soldiers he served alongside in Vietnam. He had kept on putting it off. When he finally decided to go, filmmakers Ingold & Vivianne Perelmuter accompanied him, documenting his journey. “He wanted it but he feared it as well…the journey way deeper than the destination somehow,” Perelmuter tells BDE.