Geoffrey Macnab

It’s seven months since Warner Bros Discovery’s streaming service HBO Max was launched across central and eastern Europe, the Nordics and Iberia - and gave a healthy boost to documentaries in the process. “This has been the core of our success,” enthuses Hanka Kastelicová, Max’s VP Documentaries, tells BDE of the extra visibility docs now have. “We are really a company that is growing. Currently, we are broadcasting in 74 countries.”

Ömer Sami’s Oscar-shortlisted short doc tells the story of Nasar Ghafoor, a 59-year-old Virgin Media engineer from Rochdale, UK, who wants to preserve his body through cryogenics. “I think the fact that Nasar is a regular kind of guy from the north of England was appealing to the audience,” the director tells BDE. “What could have been quite a depressing, angst-ridden film seems to have left people feeling quite hopeful at the end.”

When Brian Eno was approached to be the subject of a major new feature doc, the film’s style would have to be as inventive as his own approach to music, he insisted. “This was the only way I could get him to agree to do it,” says Gary Hustwit, director of the eponymous Eno, shortlisted for the Feature Doc Oscar®. “I think he really wanted to do it because he wanted to be part of this first generative feature film experiment.”

Will Ferrell and friend Harper Steele go on a 17-day road trip across the US after the latter transitioned to a woman post-pandemic. The journey turns out to be both emotional and revelatory as Steele experiences a mixed reception en route, sometimes joyous, at other times aggressive. “The sheer reach of Netflix is in and of itself an impact campaign,” says director Josh Greenbaum of how the film can help overcome gender prejudice. “At core, that is our goal - to get this in front of as many people as we can.”

In the feature doc exec-produced by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence, women denied abortions in Texas despite life-threatening circumstances join forces with a lawyer to file a lawsuit against the state, aiming to restore reproductive rights for themselves and others. “We’d like to make this film available for people who are making laws about women’s access to basic healthcare because we want to make sure they understand what abortion denial looks like,” co-director Abbie Perrault tells BDE.

After learning that his son, Yahya, has died at sea trying to get to Spain, Ahmed must find a way to bring his remains back to Morocco so he and his family can have a proper goodbye. “He [Ahmed] was in a lot of pain. This was one way he was able to show what he was going through,” director Baylon tells BDE of her Oscar-qualifying short documentary. “I think he just saw the injustice of it all. He didn’t understand what his son had done and didn’t understand how long this process was going to take.”

Daughters follows four girls whose fathers are in jail in Washington DC. Co-director Patton is the organiser of a father-daughter dance programme that allows these girls and their dads to meet - and dance - behind bars. “With my work with girls in the community, unfortunately I often see a disconnect between Black girls and their fathers. I’ve also seen some who have great relationships…what I have realised is that those girls who do have a relationship with their father that is positive usually have a really great outcome as they are growing into womanhood,” Patton tells BDE.

The feature competition section of this year’s Laceno d’Oro International FF (Avellino, Italy) forefonts non-fiction like never before, with all selections either straight docs or with very strong documentary elements within them. “This choice is not because we are obsessed with documentary but because we think that documentary films today are the form in which you can try to make something more original and be freer in your connection with reality," says Head Programmer Aldo Spiniello of his event running to Dec 8.

Ukrainian director Alina Maksimenko talks to Business Doc Europe about her film, nominated for Best Film and Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, in which she joins her mother and father in their village after the Russian invasion of February 24 2022. The director films their daily lives, in which the tension of their enclosed world and uncertain future seems to grip them all…and the animals they look after.

“I didn’t want just to do a movie about the history of locomotives. I wanted to show a deeper truth about the human condition through the journeys on the train," Maciej J. Drygas tells Business Doc Europe about his archive-based, dialogue-free Trains, which world-premiered this week in Amsterdam. “The train is a very peculiar and weird place for me. When you step in a train, you have the desire for something to change.”