Geoffrey Macnab

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.”

In his new documentary, Egyptian filmmaker Bassam Mortada looks back at just how his father’s imprisonment upturned his own life, and that of his parents. The very personal movie is about the impact of “the big history” of Egypt on the “very small history” of his own family. “It took us five years. We were very lucky we were more able to get backing from a lot of Arab funds that support independent filmmakers,” Elsayed notes of the film’s supporters like the Doha Film Institute.

Lidija Zelovic left Bosnia for Amsterdam when the war in the Balkans began, but has recently noticed an equally disturbing rise in intolerance and xenophobia in The Netherlands. It chronicles the way that the Dutch political scene has increasingly come to resemble the powder keg in the Balkans she remembers from 30 years ago. There is an intolerance and xenophobia in the Netherlands that she simply doesn’t remember from when she first arrived in the country, she explains.

The prolific Dutch duo are back at IDFA with their heart-rending documentary about the Ukrainian babushkas (grandmas) currently sheltering in Amsterdam as war continues to rage back home. “The city made a big effort to find places for them. We wanted to do something in regards of what it means to be a displaced person,” Peter Lataster explains of his and partner Petra’s intentions with their film.