Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.