Geoffrey Macnab

Renowned Scottish Oscar-winning actor and artist Tilda Swinton is co-director of The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze, a playful, experimental documentary produced by the Derek Jarman Lab and that looks at learning from every angle. The film, also co-directed by Bartek Dziadosz, screens in the International Competition at Sheffield Doc Fest. As Dziadosz tells BDE, they decided to make a film that would “interrogate” the very idea of education.

Dutch director Suzanne Raes discusses her new feature doc about the members of an eccentric, brilliant and sometimes dysfunctional English upper-class family coming to terms with their childhood as they prepare to pack up and leave their ancient, expansive, sprawling home in Oxfordshire. “Of course, the film is not about dragons, but about what the dragon represents; it is about the stories we create around things that frighten us,” says Raes. (Plus trailer)

“All the time I was making this, I was amazed by how resilient the people are in Kyiv and determined not to let the Russians win…This is their war. It’s not America’s war, it’s not NATO’s war. They want to win it because they feel this incredible burning sense of injustice,” Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald says of the indomitable mentality of the Ukrainians, as exemplified by the city’s mayor and former boxing world champion Vitali Klitschko.

Even in advance of its world premiere in Sheffield, Croatian director Goran Devic’s Pavilion No 6 (sold by Film Harbour) is already being billed as a Covid movie with a difference - a feelgood affair about a feelbad subject that approaches the pandemic in a humorous and surreal way. “I felt that every single individual I met [at the Covid vaccination centre] was happy to communicate. Even the shooting was some kind of communication,” Devic tells BDE.

Poland, December 1981, the period of martial law. Soldiers are on the streets. Everything from eggs to shoes to soap is in short supply. Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa is being demonised by the Communist leaders as an enemy of the state. This is the period that Tomasz Wolski examines in his new archive-based documentary, A Year in the Life of the Country, a world premiere at the Krakow Film Festival on 30 May.

Film students around the world will have the opportunity to use images from the work of French filmmaker Agnes Varda (1928-2019) thanks to an extraordinary new project that will make Varda’s rushes available on an online platform. They can then be downloaded and edited in any way the students see fit. “The platform is going to be online in June,” explains Varda’s daughter Rosalie Varda whose family production company Ciné-Tamaris has been shepherding the project.

“I found her life interesting as a Hollywood story because she was really one of the first modern celebrities. She was probably comparable to Taylor Swift,” US director Nanette Burstein tells BDE of her documentary about the Hollywood icon. “It [Taylor’s life] is a very compelling Hollywood story. It’s a story about feminism. It is a story about agency and it is a story about philanthropy.”

David Teboul talks to BDE about his new doc that takes on one of the titans of French cinema. “The idea of the film started with this incredible material,” the director says. “I had the trust of [Truffaut’s daughters] Eva and Laura Truffaut so I had access to personal unpublished archives, interviews, letters and photos…I was able to make an intimate portrait…from the point of view of Truffaut. This has never been done before.”

In his latest doc, world-premiering at Cannes 2024, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck tells the story of Ernest Cole, the brilliant South African photographer who highlighted the horrors of apartheid before his untimely passing at the age of just 49. “Some of those photos that you find in [Cole’s book] House Of Bondage followed me over years of political activism,” Peck explains his strong identification with the late South African’s work.

The Brazilian filmmakers immerse themselves within Yanomami culture for their Cannes film, inspired by a book of the same name written by shaman Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. “Seeing, listening and dreaming” are at the heart of Yanomami culture and rituals. The Yanomami have a deep empathy with other animals. Unlike the whites, they don’t see themselves as being “at the top of creation” and they don’t “treat everything and everyone else as a resource,” co-director Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha reflects.