Geoffrey Macnab

We Are Inside, which world-premiered in Nyon, explores the father-daughter relationship between poet Mustapha and his filmmaker daughter Farah Kassem in all its complexity. As she tells Business Doc Europe, director Kassem wanted “to create situations where both our mediums could meet, my camera and his poetry.”

Marcos Simon Mossello & Elias Ezequiel Gismondi set out to investigate the business of being bald, together with the residents of Tostado, an Argentinian town where hair seems to be largely absent among the men folk. “The idea for the film came to us from baldness itself, we believe that personal experiences are what take you to a place that gives you the possibility of telling something authentic, with substance, whether in a documentary or fiction,” the pair tell BDE.

In the dream-like Carropasajero we hear the testimonies of indigenous men and women from the Wayúu community in Colombia who are haunted by their colonial past. “In a way, it [the film] is invoking [the dead]. It is a way of giving presence and a voice to those who are not here. For us, that was one of the most powerful things, to feel that the process of [making] a film could be a way of sharing grief,” Carranza tells BDE.

When he was growing up in Mozambique, Pierre-François Sauter used to go on holiday to Cape Verde. Years later, the Swiss filmmaker has returned to the islands to make his stark new feature documentary Far West (world-premiering at Visions Du Réel). The film, which has almost no dialogue, focuses on two characters, Angela and Jair, as they try to eke out an existence in their fishing village in a rocky, volcanic corner of Cape Verde.

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. Right in front of 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.

In the mountains of Afghanistan, a Hazara family seeks to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of their daughter, Zahra, who moved to Kabul to study. Co-director Yourish is from a Hazara background himself. “The story of Zahra, the story of the family, it doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens within the historical context. It is a continuation of the systematic discrimination against the Hazara people,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

The Ocean Viking has often been in the news in recent years. It is the ship chartered by humanitarian organisation SOS Méditerranée to rescue migrants fleeing by sea from Libya. It has been impounded, harassed by Libyan coast guard vessels and criticised by European politicians - but it has saved countless lives. Jean-Baptiste Bonnet talks to BDE about his new film for which he followed the ship for six weeks.

Mother Vera, which world-premieres in Nyon, follows the eponymous protagonist, a charismatic former heroic addict who had lived in an Orthodox monastery in Belarus for 20 years. “I felt very drawn to her quest,” co-director Embleton reflects on her subject. “She wants to experience all of life, and yet she was in this monastery.”

Thomas Pickering’s hard-hitting (but funny) new documentary world-premieres April 10 at London’s Curzon Soho. Growing up in Yorkshire, the director never ate animal products. The future filmmaker remembers as a seven-year-old wandering through a supermarket with his mum, looking at the meat shelves and knowing instantly that he didn’t like what he was seeing. “I said to my mum, ‘I don’t want to walk down this aisle anymore,’” he tells BDE.

Dutch producer/director Pieter van Huystee tells a largely untold story in his new feature doc When I Close My Eyes (which world premiered March 24 at Movies That Matter) - that of the Dutch women and children interned in Japanese prison camps in Indonesia during the Second World War. His mother and grandmother were among the captives enduring tough and traumatic experiences. The director talks to BDE.