Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.”