Geoffrey Macnab

Aoife Kelleher’s new feature doc, which tells the story of the inspirational Irish politician, opens the Irish Film Festival London November 13. “There was a lot about her I didn’t know,” Kelleher tells BDE. I was surprised to learn about her early years with the Irish women’s liberation movement and the work she did there as a human rights lawyer. I really enjoyed digging into that period of her life.”

Anaïs Clanet of French sales company Reservoir Docs fills in BDE on her IDFA 2024 slate. While many films on her slate are selling well, other rapturously received films are proving a lot harder to shift. “It’s an extremely difficult period because public television does not buy a lot,” says Clanet. “I am being nice and kind saying that, because they pretty much buy nothing.”

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.”

In Game Changers, Aysun Bademsoy returns to the female Turkish football players she first encountered in 1995, and has periodically covered since. The film continues to chronicle the lives of women with whom she has retained a strong bond. “They understand that it [the film] is not only about them. It is about a generation of Turkish women. And I think that I opened a door for German or European people to see a world they don’t know.”

Oscar-winning Czech director Marie Dvořáková felt a natural sense of identification with photographer Marie Tomanová, the subject of her exuberant new doc World Between Us (a world premiere this week in Ji.hlava’s Czech Joy section). Like Tomanová, she too had left the Czech Republic behind to pursue her artistic career in the bohemian melting pot of New York. “I think her story mirrors the stories of thousands of people, artists who came to New York to fulfil their dreams - and I am actually one of them!” Dvořáková tells BDE.

Anna Thommen talks to Business Doc Europe about her new doc, world-premiering in Leipzig, about a bohemian migrant struggling to establish herself in Swiss society, eventually turning to nursing, albeit within a deeply conservative health service. “It was really special for me,” the director says of the collaboration. Naima wasn’t just the subject of the movie but had a creative role too. “She is a character who belongs in cinema!”

Local myth had it that when women in southern Italy were bitten by a tarantula, the only way to get rid of the poison seeping through their system was to dance out the toxin in a mad frenzy. “It is clearly related to extremely restrictive gender roles,” co-director Schäuble reflects on a sickness which seemed primarily to affect those already regarded as outsiders. “They were very often people who did not comply with strict gender norms and expectations.” The film world premieres in Leipzig.

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.”