Geoffrey Macnab

Louisiana Mees-Fongang’s feature doc debut concerns 15 unaccompanied minors living in a community centre who arrived in Belgium as refugees. “Part of their reality is complex and hard. They had tough moments. But, at the same time, they’re young, active and full of energy and potential. This is also something I really found important to show,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

Real life imitates fiction (or vice versa) in Gianluca Matarrese’s hybrid film The Zola Experience, based on a theatre production of L’assommoir by Emile Zola. “Sometimes there is more fiction in something that is supposed to be real. I really like film to break the deal that happens between director and public…I want to interrogate this contract between the director and the audience,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

IDFA paid tribute this week to NFTS doc luminary Dick Fontaine, who died unexpectedly last month, with a screening of his 1982 film I Heard It Through The Grapevine, which features author James Baldwin. “It was the most sudden news because we wanted to celebrate Dick Fontaine. We planned to invite him and have him with us - but then he passed away,” IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia tells Business Doc Europe. “It [the screening] became much more like a posthumous tribute, a way of raising our hat to him.”

UK viewers are likely to be deeply shocked by Our Land, Our Freedom, a world premiere at IDFA 2023. It reveals the brutality with which British colonial soldiers treated freedom fighters during the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. “We are only scratching the surface with this film. We would have loved to have gone much deeper…maybe if Netflix offers us a 10-part series, we will!” says co-director Meena Nanji.

Few radical feminist filmmakers are as provocative or as witty as Helke Sander, the subject of Claudia Richarz’s new feature doc, Helke Sander: Cleaning House, an international premiere in IDFA’s Luminous. What’s more, Sander is not the type to take a backward step. “Keep on fighting, don’t give up” is how German director Richarz sums up her approach to life.

During the Iran-Iraq war, Iranian movies were melted down and the silver removed to help the war effort. This is one of the historical details included in Ehsan Khoshbakht’s feature documentary Celluloid Underground, on which UK sales agent Impronta Films is launching sales at IDFA. The London-based Iranian filmmaker explains more to Business Doc Europe.

At IDFA 2023, Business Doc Europe talked to Luke Moody, Head of the BFI Doc Society Fund. “If you’re always sitting in a white tower, distant from the community you’re supposed to be serving, then you will never understand your connection with them and they won’t understand their opportunity to be in dialogue with you,” he explained of his approach to task of supporting UK docmakers.

US director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, The First Wave) was in Amsterdam during IDFA this weekend. He gave a Q&A following a Soho House screening of his new feature doc American Symphony (available globally on Netflix on 29 November) that follows the Grammy and Oscar winning musical maestro Jon Batiste as he composes a major new work. Heineman also spoke to Business Doc Europe about the film.

Girl Away from Home follows 13-year-old Nastia, an elite gymnast from Kyiv who, after winning the Ukrainian championship with her tightknit group of friends, is forced to flee to Germany with her grandmother due to war in Ukraine. “What does it mean for a kid to be driven out of their own country? That’s why we decided to follow up in Germany,” Danish Wilmont explains.

It’s now almost exactly 20 years since Saddam Hussein, the toppled President of Iraq, was discovered by US troops hiding in a hole in remote farmland. The story of Alaa Namiq, the farmer who harboured the world’s most wanted man, is told in the new feature doc from Norwegian-Kurdish filmmaker, Halkawt Mustafa. “It took me four years to make him feel sure he wanted to tell his story!” the director tells BDE of his subject.