Geoffrey Macnab

Debutant Philipp Döring tells BDE about his epic documentary that is catching the eye of many international festival directors, as well as German press and media. “The good thing was that I didn’t have anybody telling me it had to be shorter because I was the producer myself,” the director explains the film’s long running time. “I started editing. The first rough cut was 10 hours, the second was six and the third cut was around four hours. I got rid of everything that you don’t really need. What is left is worth seeing.”

Making his latest feature doc, Poland-based Indian filmmaker Arjun Talwar ventured no further than his own street in Warsaw, where he filmed its myriad inhabitants. The resulting work is both dark and playful. “That’s part of my personality, to look for humour and find the absurdities,” Talwar volunteers to BDE. “It was something important I wanted this film to possess, being able to laugh at life and at itself.”

The Pluto Film boss is in Berlin with Circusboy in Generation, and two doc projects at EFM; The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe and The Underground Railroad, made by friends and fellow filmmakers, Martijn Blekendaal and Finbarr Wilbrink. Cölle tells BDE that she is looking to board documentaries as well as dramas at an earlier stage, with the “possibility to co-produce, to get into the funding [of documentary] and to offer a way to be part of the financial structure of projects.”

In his debut documentary world-premiering in Berlin, Paraguayan Juanjo Pereira takes on a historical subject about which he could find very little archive at home , the dictatorship of Paraguayan General Alfredo Stroessner, who was finally toppled in 1989. His solution was to cast around the rest of the world - and to see how the Stroessner years were portrayed by foreign media outlets. Director Pereira talks to Business Doc Europe.

It’s the worst form of mental torture you can imagine - your child held hostage and very little you can do to free her. This was the predicament of the parents of Liat Beinin Atzili, kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 2023 along with her husband, Aviv. The story of how Yehuda and Chaya coped, and how they worked tirelessly to liberate their daughter, is told in Brandon Kramer’s feature documentary Holding Liat, a world premiere February 16 in Berlin. The director talks to BDE.

Irish outfit Silver Mountain Distribution is embracing documentary in earnest. The company, which is the sales and marketing arm of Carey Fitzgerald’s Silver Mountain Productions, is at the European Film Market in Berlin with three new feature docs on its slate. “We only work on creative documentaries. One of our aims is also to work on stories of the under-represented,” Fitzgerald explains why Silver Mountain is muscling into the doc sales arena.

In her new feature doc, world-premiering in Berlin, Luzia Schmid profiles the extraordinary German actress, singer, author and femme fatale Hildegard Knef, a woman of immense contradictions, but who, despite having worked with the greatest movie directors of the era such as Billy Wilder to Carol Reed, made few truly memorable films. “I instantly fell in love with her because I felt that nobody in Germany would talk so freely and so charmingly about things not working out well,” says director Schmid.

Lviv in western Ukraine was Vitaly Mansky’s home town, before he left as a young man to study film in Moscow. When filming his Ukrainian protagonists, some of whom were gravediggers and members of a brass band who play at funerals, Mansky was wary how families who had lost their loved ones at the hands of the Russian army might react toward him. After a funeral, one of the fathers came up to him. He was frightened about what the man might do, but in the end the father thanked him “for being on our side.”

When Tamara Stepanyan’s father, the renowned Armenian stage and screen actor Vigen Stepanyan, died aged 68 in 2021, she felt an overwhelming sense of bereavement. “This was a big trauma because it was really a very unexpected death. He died very fast and sudden,” the Armenian director recalls to Business Doc Europe. “I had this desire, a very profound one, to continue the discussion with him.”

Oleksiy Radynski’s feature documentary, world-premiering in Berlin, chronicles hapless members of the invading Russian army after they have entered Ukraine’s notorious Chernobyl nuclear facility. “What you see in the film is that the much-feared Russian army that had this image as an unstoppable and ruthless force is actually extremely incompetent and ridiculous, in a way unprofessional - deeply dysfunctional also,” Radynski tells BDE.