Geoffrey Macnab

Vita Maria Drygas’ Danger Zone is described as “a front-row, unfiltered, look at the global war tourism industry,” a film in which its subjects prefer being in the most lethal conflict zones to lounging on the beach. “The most important thing that drove me to the subject, it wasn’t to tell the story of these particular characters. I really thought it was more universal - that the subject shows the condition of our world. It was for me like a mirror of our times,” Drygas tells BDE.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature doc, which is well positioned to advance during the upcoming Awards season. She talks to BDE.

“In making the film, I discovered he [Little Richard] was more than an icon. He had incredible substance that has never been really documented. His anarchic, rebellious spirit has left a musical and cultural impression on us to this day,” the director tells Business Doc Europe during a whistle stop trip to London in early December to introduce a special screening of her new film at the V&A Museum in South Kensington.

In her documentary which recently won the top prize at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival, Asmae El Moudir rebuilds the Morocco of her childhood using hand crafted models as she tries to unravel long concealed family secrets. Along the way she discovers small lies that lead to disturbing revelations about the entire society. “There is a lot of pain here but there is a lot of laughing also in the film. We can laugh, we can cry, we can have every emotion in this film. For me, cinema is emotion,” she tells BDE.

The German luminary spoke to Business Doc Europe during Cannes 2023 when presenting his new documentary Anselm and his fiction film Perfect Days. “Working on my documentaries, I always find myself trying to introduce fictional elements or at least parts of the language of fictional storytelling that I want to apply to the documentary language. And vice versa, in fictional films, I try as hard as I can to bring in documentary methods.” he said.

Jennefer, Deirdre and Helen all had very difficult times to endure during the pandemic: bereavement, illness and isolation. How did they combat this? By bathing every day in the icy waters of Lake Michigan. Samantha Sanders’s 15-minute doc about the women has now screened at around 40 festivals, winning more than a dozen awards, and is an Oscar contender. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

It’s the crucial question but a reductive and even unanswerable one: is the fashion designer John Galliano a racist bigot? “That’s the million-dollar question…that’s what the film is answering in a way,” Scottish Oscar-winning filmmaker tells BDE of his new doc profiling the British fashion designer who was sacked by Dior after his public antisemitic rants in Paris in 2011.

Reservoir Docs is looking forward to 2024 with renewed optimism. Anaïs Clanet, head of sales and acquisitions at the French doc outfit, acknowledges to Business Doc Europe that “our numbers are still half of what they used to be” in the pre-pandemic era. Nevertheless, she has been ramping up the Reservoir Docs slate with half a dozen eye-catching new titles.

When Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams first read the book ‘Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas in America,’ he was shocked. As a Black American, he thought he knew plenty already about racism in America but author Ibram X. Kendi gave him new insights into the deep-rooted causes of that racism. “After reading the book, I saw the world differently,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

At IDFA, BDE caught up with Ted Hope, one of the towering figures of US indie film over the last 30 years and producer of Invisible Nation, directed by his partner Vanessa Hope and about Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen. He discussed the new film as well as his career to date, including his time as head of production at Amazon Original Movies. “If I had to say what did I do really well in my time at Amazon, I’d say it was to fight for time for the filmmakers. Every time we did that, it made the movie better.”