Geoffrey Macnab

If you go to Niscemi in Sicily, you’ll find both picturesque woodland and, very incongruously, a US base housing a Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite ground station. Beside it lives Valentina, a woman in her 20s, together with her parents. “In the beginning, it [the film] started as a story about the base. But then, as I was discovering that the fight was gone and there was no hope anymore, I met the family. I found their resistance [to the base] very interesting,” director Francesca Scalisi tells BDE.

When he was a young man, director Daniel Abma dreamed of being a school teacher, but when it came to the crunch the responsibility seemed too enormous. Nevertheless, he always retained an enormous admiration for teachers and caregivers, who are now the subject of his new doc, selected for German Competition in Leipzig. “Now I am a filmmaker, I can contribute something to the cause by showing them my respect by making a portrait of the important work they do,” Abma tells BDE of his subjects.

For Christoph Terhechte, DOK Leipzig can be “instrumental as a festival in helping to boot the career of a film.” A premiere here can provide the perfect launchpad for sales and a later theatrical life, he tells BDE. “It is super important for filmmakers to have their film in Competition in a festival like ours because that might make the difference between a film that gets seen by a happy few or one that reaches the widest possible audience.”

Thomas Riedelsheimer’s new documentary, opening DOK Leipzig (28 Oct-3 Nov), looks at light from the twin perspectives of art and quantum physics. “I am just stunned by the topic, the vastness of what light can mean and be,” the director tells Business Doc Europe. “All these little things make me just aware that the world is a place of wonder.”

For five years, Slovak director Marek Šulík followed Zuzana Čaputová after she was elected President of her country in 2019. The politician initially took a little time to agree to the documentary, but her advisors and civil servants were all supportive from the word go. “I didn’t meet anybody who was angry or felt bad about my camera. Somehow, they understood this was a unique situation, that in Slovakia we had a woman in this post. It was special, valuable and needed to be recorded.”

Oscar-winner Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi talks to BDE about her National Geographic film, co-directed with Jimmy Chin and Natalie Hewit, about the great Anglo-Irish explorer, Ernest Shackleton, and the hair-raising Antarctic expedition in which his ship (The Endurance) was lost, but everyone on board saved. “I’ve always been fascinated by great adventure stories,” underlines Vasarhelyi, who was joined in conversation by British historian Dan Snow.

2024 marks the 6th edition of Nebulae, DocLisboa’s industry and networking event. Marina Thomé (an established photographer and documentary filmmaker in her own right) is coordinator. As a former participant in the festival’s Arché development and mentorship programme, she has seen at first-hand how the festival can “open doors” for new projects. She coordinated Arché last year - and so knows the workings of the programme inside out. Thomé answers questioned posed by BDE.

Ted Passon discusses his film about the extraordinary and ebullient Patrice Jetter, a disability activist who will lose her benefits if she marries her disabled partner Garry. “If the story was told well, it had a lot to do with the fact that we had disabled folks at every level of production, working with us…they were always there, helping us check on the story,” Passon says of his awards contender doc. “They were helping along the way, making sure it was authentic.”

“Its vocation is very clear. It’s a festival that understands very well its own mission - that aims for a political sense, a social sense, and that is devoted to cinematic language,” Doclisboa Director Paula Astorga tells Business Doc Europe as doors open on the festival’s 22th edition, running 17-27 October. The festival opens with Luciana Fina’s Sempre, made for the 50th anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.

In his doc debut, established fiction director Justin Kurzel follows fellow Australian Warren Ellis (musician, wild man violinist, composer and Nick Cave collaborator) as he embarks on a new venture, working closely with a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra. For director Kurzel it felt cathartic to be working on a documentary after making all his big budget dramatic features. “I truly loved it. As a filmmaker, I found it enormously liberating. I found myself constantly touched with the present and the possibility of what something could be.”