Geoffrey Macnab

Master docmaker Victor Kossakovsky spoke to Business Doc Europe before the Feb 19 world premiere of his Berlinale Competition pick Architecton, a lyrical, hypnotising and often disturbing documentary on architecture that includes everything from massive landslides to shots of bombed out Ukrainian buildings, from ancient monuments to scenes of Italian architect Michele De Lucchi creating a stone circle in his garden.

The impulse to make Favoriten came from director Ruth Beckermann's anger about the school system in Austria and Germany. She doesn’t like the way kids are “divided” at the age of 10. Nor is she happy about the lack of support given to children who haven’t grown up speaking German. “The school system is one of the most difficult to change because there is so much of a class struggle involved…the elites don’t want these kids to move up in society,” Beckermann tells BDE.

Legendary Bronx-born US indie director Abel Ferrara was in Berlin this weekend with his new feature doc Turn In The Wound (screening as a Berlinale special). The film offers a portrait of the Ukrainian people at war and includes testimony about their horrific experiences after the full-scale invasion. “I don’t believe in the devil but when you read about and see these things up front, close up and personal, you’ve got to entertain the idea [that evil exists],” he tells BDE.

In his new film At Averroès & Rosa Parks (screening this week as a Berlinale Special), French documentary master Nicolas Philibert continues his exploration of mental illness and its treatments in French hospitals. “Making movies is my solution to keep balance in my life,” the director tells BDE. “The people I film are very vulnerable but they reflect back something I have inside me too.”

The conversations are chilling and, as the film’s title indicates, intercepted. Russian soldiers calling home chat about their casual looting of trainers or electrical goods and, as if in passing, how they’ve been torturing and killing the local Ukrainians. “It was in the first days of the invasion that I started listening to [the intercepted calls]…the effect they had on me was of some kind of cognitive dissonance,” director Karpovych tells BDE. “It was really shocking and very painful to realise how absurd they were."

Chilean Maite Alberdi talks to BDE about her Oscar-nominated feature doc The Eternal Memory, her second nomination in four years after The Mole Agent in 2021. The Eternal Memory offers a gentle, probing examination of a marriage, that between journalist and author Augusto Góngora, and Paulina Urrutia (an actress and former Minister of Culture). They’re a couple devoted to one another, and have been together for more than two decades. But Augusto has Alzheimer’s, and his memory is no longer reliable.

Leading French producer Bertrand Faivre explains to Business Doc Europe why he boarded acclaimed novelist Christine Angot’s feature doc debut, about the sexual abuse she suffered from her father when she was a young teenager. “I had a chance to see a few images of the film - and I was ready to take the risk to put up the money to finish it and to face whatever would happen,” Faivre says. “Wow, was my first response.”

The documentary about life in drought-ridden Kenya is told from three very different perspectives; the indigenous Kenyan farmers, the conservationists struggling to protect the land and the white ranchers who have been there for generations. “From the beginning, when we conceived the idea, we were really talking about how to achieve a result where an audience would be able to shift perspective,” Greek-born co-director Matziaraki tells BDE of the film. She is joined by producer Toni Kamau.

Canadian filmmakers Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy talk to BDE about their portrait of Lloyd, the compelling, homeless subject of their 62-minute film, selected for IFFR. They were struck in particular by his “timeless” quality, his “beautiful penetrating blue eyes” as Cassidy puts it, and his “biblical” beard. They felt he could have “walked out of an old daguerreotype or a Russian novel.”

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s emotionally-charged documentary follows the family of Norwegian photographer Maria Gros Vatne as they deal with the bitter new reality of her untimely death from cancer. Her friend’s passing hit Jacobsen very hard as well, at which point the director decided she “had to make something from [Vatne’s] universe,” she tells Business Doc Europe.