Geoffrey Macnab

After Swiss director Morgane Frund agreed to edit footage that an amateur filmmaker had been shooting of bears in the wilderness, she discovered that the tapes had more than imagery of the natural world on them. They also contained footage he had secretly shot of young women on the streets. Frund’s subsequent short doc, short-listed for the 96th Academy Awards, became a work on voyeurism, the male gaze and the objectification of women. The filmmaker talks to BDE.

George Michaels is one of the unsung heroes of US political life, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who, in 1970, changed his mind and supported a bill extending abortion rights, in the process bringing his political career to an end. His story is told in the Oscar shortlisted short film Deciding Vote. “We’re not used in this era to people who change their minds. It’s not something that politicians do,” says co-director Jeremy Workman.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.

Precocious 24-year-old New York-based Italian filmmaker Giorgio Ghiotto has already won a ‘gold’ Student Academy Award for his graduation movie, Wings Of Dust, Now, he is in contention for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The film profiles Vidal Merma, a Peruvian Indigenous journalist and activist fighting against the pollution caused by the industrial exploitation of his ancestral lands. Ghiotto talks to BDE.

Justine Martin’s first film Oasis (a short documentary Oscar contender) concerns twin brothers who realise they are destined to live more separate lives as one’s developmental issues mean he will not be offered the same opportunities as the other. Martin’s approach to the subject is lyrical. “It was one of my goals to make it [the documentary] feel as if it was a fiction,” she tells BDE. “I really wanted the film to feel like a wave of emotions rather than of facts.”

Hanka Kastelicová, VP and Executive Producer of Documentaries for HBO Max in Europe, talks to Business Doc Europe about the slate of docs she will be serving up in 2024. These include Tudor Giurgiu’s new doc Nasty – More Than Just Tennis, one of the first HBO titles set to premiere on the new Max streaming service across Europe in the spring of 2024.

Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-shortlisted feature doc started out as a study of toxic masculinity in India before transforming into the story of a father’s search for justice following the horrific rape of his 13-year old daughter. “I didn’t actually realise until the edit. It was two years into the editing process that we pivoted, switched gears and decided that we were just going to focus on this story,” Pahuja tells BDE.

Frederick Wiseman can’t remember what he ate the first time he went to Le Bois Sans Feuilles restaurant in Ouche, France, but knows it was good. In fact it was so good he asked top chef and future successor César Troisgros if he could document life in the extablishment. “It’s very rare that I eat in a 3-star restaurant, and I can’t turn off my documentary filmmaker eye. I hadn’t planned to do it but I just blurted it [the idea] out and I was happy when he said why not,” Wiseman tells BDE.

It’s a magical place, a warehouse in LA which many have likened to Gepetto’s workshop in Pinocchio. Broken musical instruments are brought here in their dozens and craftspeople put them back together again. In their latest film together, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers go inside the workshop which ensures that school kids without money can continue to play their violins, trumpets and pianos. The filmmakers talk to BDE.

In her directorial debut at the age of 84, legendary US doc producer Sheila Nevins turns to the shocking restrictions placed by US educators on reading material for kids. These includes works by James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood as well as graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about The Holocaust. The constituency Nevins turns to in her film is the kids themselves. “I know what the left thinks, I know what the right thinks, I don’t know what the kid thinks,” she sums up why children are placed fully in the frame.