Geoffrey Macnab

Prolific Canadian filmmaker Olivier Godin’s documentary shows visual artist and choreographer Adam Kinner and his dancers at work recreating the 1957 ballet work Suite Canadienne. “I had never done a documentary before. I thought, OK, let’s try things,” Godin tells BDE of his freewheeling approach to the task. It helped that Kinner gave the director ‘carte blanche’ to approach the film in any way he saw fit.

UK doccer Marc Isaacs talks to Business Doc Europe about his multi-layered new film set in the sleepy British town of Thaxted. It’s a film that involves ghosts and Morris dancing and a Chinese filmmaker visiting the town to find to the subject of her next film. “I was already thinking about Englishness, mythology and the way that the country over the last few years has desperately been trying to solidify some sense of itself,” Isaacs reflects.

In his new film The Pigeon Tunnel (in cinemas and on Apple TV globally from October 20th), renowned documentary maker Errol Morris explores the life and work of writer John Le Carré, author of such classic espionage novels as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. “[I] could have gone on forever with this guy,” the Oscar-winning Morris tells Business Doc Europe.

The feature documentary Ana + kek tells a very personal story, about twin sisters whose beliefs have taken them on very different paths. “I felt I was too close to the subject,” says Zohra Benhammou of why she turned to Romy Mana to co-direct the film. “I needed someone who [could] take a distance [from it], to guide me into the story.”

Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe, whose new documentary The Jacket screened at the Flemish CONNEXT showcase, has been at the Gent Festival this week, just down the road from Antwerp, but he hasn’t been showing a movie. “I work here as an editor. It’s really just taking formats, making DCPs for the cinemas thinks like that, just technical work,” Poppe tells BDE of his current “side hustle” between making his own movies.

This week Sarah Lederman was singled out by Oscar-nominated Belgian director Lukas Dhont as one of the Future Five group of highly talented emerging filmmakers from the region. Lederman was the sole docmaker. “People say sometimes about me that I see things they didn’t see,” Lederman reflects to BDE, “I look deeply into things, I love details and I just love the things that make the everyday special.”

Film partnerships in Flanders sometimes start in surprising ways. The collaboration between director Marjolijn Prins (whose new feature doc project Fantastique won the Perfect Pitch Award at CONNEXT this week) and producer Mirna Everhard from Serendipity Films can be traced back to when they worked in the same bar. The director and producer explain all to BDE.

What starts as a story about humans, kidney stones and stones in a geological sense, slowly unfolds into a meditation on ecological grief. “We always say that stone is silent, it is dead. I wanted to do something opposite and bring it very much to life. The kidney stone is a metaphor for that,” says director Benoot.

Hans Everaert is at the Flanders showcase this week with 2m2 by Volkan Üce, whose 2021 documentary All-in was received rapturously by critics and audiences alike. Currently in pre-production, 2m2 is a story about burial, immigration, religion and commerce and focuses on Turkish undertaker based in Belgium. “He has a special kind of feeling for humour without losing sight of content and the theme,” Everaert says of director Üce.

Louisiana Mees-Fongang’s feature doc debut concerns 15 unaccompanied minors living in a community centre who had previously 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.