Geoffrey Macnab

“Does Europe have to get dirty before getting green?” That’s the key question asked in Scars Of Growth, the new feature doc from Linda Osusky and Monika Grassl. One of the subjects the film explores is the green mining of the raw material needed for new technologies. “Mentally, I think that it is an old generation that is guiding and directing the policies…we want to show that it is the wrong way. You cannot mine yourself out of the climate crisis…you cannot destroy nature to save nature,” says co-director Linda Osusky tells BDE.

Welcome to the very unusual rural retreat where queer youngsters can spend time attending workshops, having fun and addressing any anxieties they may feel about school, family or identity. “When I saw the field full of parents dropping off their kids, I immediately had to cry,” Dutch co-director van der Rhee describes his feelings when he first encountered the camp. “A field full of queer young people who are accepted by their parents - that affected me so super deeply.”

When she began work on The Tender Revolution (screening in Competition - Focus at FIFDH Geneva), German director Annelie Boros was “looking for people who put care at the centre of all they are doing - caregivers or also care-takers.” She adds to BDE: “I feel there is this connection between taking care of humans but also everything which is alive - and this is something not really talked about in the care debate most of the time.”

There can be something very grim and unseemly about the use of the “veto” at the UN. The five permanent members of the Security Council (France, the UK, China, Russia and the US) can block any resolution that comes before them. Sometimes, when they do so, war crimes and genocide may follow. “I have enormous respect for the diplomats at the United Nations because they are doing a very difficult thing. Unfortunately, the UN has an Achilles’ heel [the veto] built in at the very beginning,” director Tim Slade tells BDE.

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child Of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and a world premiere in competition in Thessaloniki) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.

Martyn Robertson’s film follows 18-year-old Ethan Walker, a promising footballer recovering from a horrific road accident, as he embarks on an epic bike ride to deliver a pennant for the 2024 Euros opening match between Germany and Scotland. Despite his traumatic injuries, Ethan's positivity shines through, giving the film heart and optimism, something the director believes is often lacking in contemporary documentaries. “We don’t see enough of that in filmmaking today,” underlines Robertson.

A world premiere at Glasgow FF, Alex Holmes new doc tells the story of Formula 1 champion Damon Hill and his relationship with his father Graham, who was twice F1 champion in the 1960s but who died in a plane crash in 1975. “However you want to put it, there was a deeper force pushing Damon to achieve his ambitions in Formula One,” the director tells BDE.

Oscar nominee Walter Salles has revealed further details of his ambitious new four-part documentary series about legendary Brazilian footballer and political activist, Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, the languid midfielder known to the world simply as Sócrates. “I have the highest admiration for Sócrates in all his complexity,” the director explains to BDE his desire to make the film.

This week has marked the 10th anniversary of German Films’ ‘Face To Face’ initiative. At the event, “outstanding talents from the German film landscape” are presented to international delegates at the Berlinale. The one figure from the documentary world participating this year was Mala Reinhardt, who is working on her new doc Mother/Tongue, which concerns the painful legacy of British colonial mistreatment of the Tamil people. Reinhardt talks to BDE.

Julia Loktev’s epic verité documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow dives headfirst into the lives of a remarkable group of journalists working for news channel TV Rain in Moscow. The documentary offers a portrait of the independent media in the period just before Putin's invasion of Ukraine began, 'the last months when it was possible to work and when people were still fighting from the inside,” Loktev tells BDE.