Geoffrey Macnab

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.

In his latest documentary, Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer profiles virtuoso Syrian musician Kinan Azmeh, who has lived in New York since 2001, unable to return to his home town of Damascus since the uprising of 2011. “The film is about Kinan and his musical friends,” the director explains, adding that, “I regard all my films as non-political, but I agree with Johan van der Keuken [Dutch master documentary maker] when he says that every work of art is politically engaged.”

Gyz La Rivière’s Videotheek Marco, a world premiere at IFFR, is a tribute to the lost world of Dutch video stores - to a now bygone era when VHS tapes dominated leisure time in the Netherlands. “I really miss it,” La Rivière sighs as he contemplates the days when video outlets were almost as commonplace as supermarkets. “I was born in the year of video, 1976, and so I really love the ratio 4:3,” he says of the (almost) square format in which almost all movies were seen on VHS.

David Borenstein talks to BDE about his Sundance feature doc co-directed with, and featuring, Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, a schoolteacher in an industrial town in Russia who decided to chronicle the way the war was affecting his school. “This is something of a political thriller and a very vital record of wartime Russia, but then to have Pasha’s voice at the centre creates that heart-warming, schoolyard drama vibe as well,” says Borenstein.