Geoffrey Macnab

Director Victor Kossakovsky and botanist Stefano Mancuso take viewers on an unprecedented journey into the life of trees. As Kossakovsky tells BDE, when he was three or four years old, growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, he was shown a leaf by his mother. She explained how trees are highly complex and sensitive organisms. “It is my first memory of myself,” Kossakovsky tells BDE of this early nature lesson.

In his new 3D feature doc, Wim Wenders profiles the work of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The parallels between architecture and filmmaking are obvious, points out Wenders, who works in a similar way to his illustrious subject. A house, he believes, “is a story,” and in a film, each shot can be regarded as “a brick in time” out of which scenes and then entire movies are built. “I don’t think the movie is remotely there when you have a script. Actually, I don’t think it is there at all. It is only in the shooting process that the film takes shape,” he adds.

The Soviet Union is revealed in all its contradictions in Sergei Loznitsa’s sprawling new archive-based documentary Imperium (screening this week in Venice Open - Out of Competition). The footage he uses was shot by Italian filmmakers in the early 1970s. They travelled to every corner of the Soviet empire, from major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg to far flung towns in central Asia; from Ukraine to the Baltics, from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The Ukrainian director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s 25-minute ‘horror’ film, which started shooting in January this year, shows ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents terrorising the residents of Minneapolis. “We knew it had to be filmed then,” Poitras tells BDE. “It [the US] is a country that has violence at its core; it has empire at its core, and it is engaging in violence [all the time],” she adds.

In Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas’ hybrid doc world-premiering in Venice, Salomé sifts through five decades of Cardenas family footage in search of the reasons behind her mother’s depression. Co-director Gómez was able to bring a detached eye to over 70 hours of family footage that was so personal for Cárdenas. “I am so close to it that I am not seeing the creative possibilities, because I am seeing mainly my family,” Cárdenas recalls the dilemma that his partner was able to solve.

As Derek Jarman was shooting his acclaimed 1991 feature Edward II, young cinematographer Seamus McGarvey was chronicling the whole production process verité-style. Thirty years on, the footage that McGarvey shot forms the spine of Queer Edward II, UK director Theo Rollason’s feature documentary which has been screening to acclaim this week in Venice. Rollason discusses his new work - as well as the late, great Jarman - with BDE.

Julia Loktev’s new film begins just two days after its predecessor (My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow) ended, the point at which the last remaining independent media outfits in Russia were shut down. Some of the journalists head to Istanbul, others to Israel or Georgia. Some ended up in Prague or Vienna. “History happened and I kept shooting directly, when everybody fled Russia. I followed them and I just kept shooting,” Loktev tells BDE. “I had this incredible opportunity to capture this historic moment as it was happening.”

In her new doc, world-premiering in Venice before its North American premiere at TIFF, the revered double-Oscar winner is back on the picket line, focusing on the UPS drivers, Amazon employees and app-based bike delivery workers who are keeping the city of New York ticking over. Their working conditions, however, are often deplorable. “It’s a world where the ‘deliveristas’ have absolutely nothing. They have to buy their gloves, their motorcycles or their bikes. Beyond that, they have to look over their shoulders now to make sure that ICE is not trailing them,” Kopple tells BDE.

Filmmakers Vasarhelyi and Chin discuss their audacious new feature doc in which mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson plan to climb, together with Chin, the North Face of Mount Everest, before skiing back down the way they came. “You can shape and define your fate to a certain degree. We all think that as humans we get to decide everything. We don’t,” Chin tells BDE. “There is only so much you can control…”

Sophie Fiennes is back with her latest Pervert’s Guide, once again made with the maverick Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and movie lover, Slavoj Zizek. “I think the absurd is something he embraces,” Fiennes says of Zizek’s freewheeling approach. “It’s a reflection of him being a person who is an outsider, a free thinker - and the deadpan comedy of it is particular to him. I never know what is going to happen when I put him in those situations. I have no idea. It’s an experiment.”