Geoffrey Macnab

Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel discusses her Venice documentary, world-premiering September 4 and described as “a visual diary of the war from the very first days,” with BDE. “Just psychologically, when you are in the war and you are making a film about the war, it’s quite complicated just to survive. On the other side, this job, this work, this film helped us to keep…sane!” she says.

Elizabeth Lo received rapturous reviews for her debut documentary feature Stray (2020), about stray dogs in Istanbul. Michael Moore called it “a simple work of genius” and it won several awards on the festival circuit. Now, the Hong Kong and LA-based director is back with a project in a very different groove. It’s also about straying - but this time the protagonists are humans cheating on their spouses. The director explains more to BDE.

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the frame for his new film, One to One: John & Yoko, which world-premiered at Venice. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Andres Veiel’s new documentary, which received its world premiere to rave reviews in Venice this week, makes a damning case against notorious director Leni Riefensthal, whose patron was Adolf Hitler. The film comes at a time when Germany is seeing a wave of right-wing extremism. “[It] is a warning not to accept this new nationalism and celebration of the strong. That is what’s Riefenstahl’s ideology is. We are really experiencing a renaissance of it,” says Veiel, who is joined in interview by producer Sandra Maischberger.

French director Léo Favier talks to Business Doc Europe about his new documentary, world-premiering August 31 in Venice, which profiles the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. “I think the work of animation is pretty particular. You can control everything and I guess you can really be obsessive with the perfectionism of the movement. Also, it’s the Japanese work culture…they really work a lot,” Favier confides. “I have the feeling that he [Miyazaki] gives everything.”

The idea for Swedish Goran Hugo Olsson’s new feature doc, screening Out of Competition, came after he was given access to public TV archives, when he realised just how much material there was about Palestine and Israel. All the time, he says, there were idealists on both sides trying hard to come up with models for co-existence in the region, the director laments to Business Doc Europe. “It’s a takeaway that so many people had these ideas and we could have been in a totally different situation…All the people who are most aggressive, most violent - they have prevailed.”

Filmmakers Blair Young and Carla J Easton set out to explain why pop history has never given Scottish girl bands their full due, despite the list of acts being long and compelling. “Practically every band in the documentary merit their own documentary,” Young points out how difficult it was to fit in all the material they gathered. The filmmakers set their sights high. “We always wanted it to feel like the greatest mixtape your friend had ever given you of music you’ve never heard of - and to represent that visually,” says Easton.

In his found footage documentary Eight Postcards From Utopia (world-premiering in Fuori Concorso), Golden Bear-winning director and arch cinematic provocateur Radu Jude casts a very quizzical eye on the world of Romanian advertising in the post-socialist years. Working with philosopher [and co-director] Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Jude explores the hidden meanings behind these commercials. The co-directors talk to BDE.

Thirteen years after his award-winning Two Years at Sea (2011) Ben Rivers returns to the Scottish highlands to chronicle the life of hermit Jake Williams. “I started seeing new details and thinking about what big major changes the world had been through,” Rivers tells BDE of his initial delay to shooting. “It was interesting that his [Jake’s] life somehow remained quite untouched and intact. That turned it around for me - and then I was fine!”

Britpop band Blur get the full doc treatment in Toby L’s new film, released in the UK and Ireland on July 19. It is a fully cinematic experience, telling how the band put together its first album in eight years before going back on the road. “One of my pet grievances with music docs is that they feel a bit detached. They don’t emotionally tune you into the vibrancy of the performance. For me, I obsess over those details. To put people in a dark room with a big screen, that is definitely my desire,” the director tells BDE.