Geoffrey Macnab

The Home Game is an underdog story, and a funny and uplifting one at that. Winner of the Audience Award at Nordisk Panorama, the film follows the tiny Icelandic football team of Reynir as they play in the local FA Cup on a home pitch that has gone unused since a 10-0 defeat in 1996 to a rival golf club. On paper, Reynir don’t stand a chance in the Cup, but football isn’t played on paper. “I don’t think we could have written it any better,” says co-director Gunn. “If we had written it, people would have told us, no, that could never happen. That’s…cheesy!”

Co-director Murray Grigor talks to BDE about the great Scottish comedy icon Billy Connolly and the film he and Paddy Higson made of the Big Yin’s 1975 Irish tour during a time of turmoil in the country. “Something like 35 guns were taken off people in Belfast [before Connolly’s performance]…That’s why the scenes in the dressing room are really quite tough,” Grigor says of the fraught atmosphere before the comedian went on stage.

Direct Action, which world-premiered this week at Berlin, documents the everyday lives within one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France. The filmmakers’ intentions were straightforward. As co-director Russell puts it, “the goal was to spend time with people we really admired and to spend time in a place that is mysterious, and to understand [it] for ourselves.”

Director Birgitte Staermose revisits the subjects of her 2009 short film Out Of Love, which offered an insight into the tough lives of kids after the war in Kosovo. “My primary motivation was that I started to see the struggle they had had over the years,” she says of her subjects nearly 15 years on. “They were very much survivors, strong characters all of them. They were not in any way behaving like a victim of the situation. They were amazingly capable people [but] despite all their efforts, I could [still] see the struggle.”

Austrian Alexander Horwath has held a fascination for American film star Henry Fonda all his life. At the age of 17, he even wrote a school paper about the Hollywood legend. Now Fonda is the subject of Horwath’s debut film. ““The type of man he represented, the scepticism, the self-critical nature of some of his characters and of himself…” Horwath reflects to BDE. “He was a counter-image to what I was usually presented with, which was the strong American virile guy who wins all his battles.”

German director Katharina Pethke’s first full-length documentary feature Reproduction (sold by Pluto Film and which premiered in Berlinale Forum) touches on art, architecture and family history. It also reflects her own dilemmas about art, work and family. “The breaking point for feminism nowadays is motherhood, I would say. It is still impossible to be both [mother and artist],” Pethke tells Business Doc Europe.

Director David Hinton talks to Business Doc Europe about the great filmmaking duo responsible for The Red Shoes, A Matter Of Life And Death and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, and their influence on Martin Scorsese who both collaborated on and narrated Hinton’s new film Made In England, which screened this week as a Berlinale Special.

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.