Geoffrey Macnab

Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov talks to Business Doc Europe about 20 Days In Mariupol, a Dutch premiere in Best of Fests and already an Oscar contender. The film is sold by Dogwoof. “What I didn’t want to do was to impose any feelings or judgements on the audience by being too emotional or over-analysing. But at the same time, I needed to show care. I am part of this society. I am part of this country,” says Chernov.

In his new film, Nôs Dança (a world premiere earlier this week in Doclisboa’s Heartbeat section) Rui Lopes da Silva accompanies his friend, dancer and choreographer António Tavares, on an epic journey across the Cape Verde islands. “The idea of the film began at a New Year’s party at the house of a friend. During that night, we danced all the styles of dance of Cape Verde,” the director tells BDE.

Pioneering new Brazilian political doc The Chamber/A Câmara (a world premiere in Doclisboa’s From The Earth To The Moon section) takes viewers deep into Brazil’s Chamber Of Deputies late during the highly controversial presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. The film follows the politicians in classic fly on the wall style - and all its subjects are female. The directors talk to Business Doc Europe.

“I started the film 20 years ago,” Ricardo Leite says of his feature documentary, whose full title reads ‘Lucefece: Where there is no vision, the people will perish.’ At film school, the director was part of a collective which made experimental shorts - and the new doc has links to the work he was doing then. “I saw this film was a way to find my own path, my own language, but still with references from the school.”

Czech filmmaker Petr Jančárek is not apologetic about his huge admiration for former President Václav Havel (1936-2011), the subject of his new feature documentary, Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me?, which opens this year’s Ji.hlava IDFF. “It’s actually true that Havel is perceived differently abroad than at home. Czech society is quite sharply divided between his admirers and those who actually hate him - literally,” the director tells BDE.

The new documentary chronicles the protests, sit-ins and strikes of workers in southern Spain as they face up to the prospect that they might be laid off. When she began filming, director Rodríguez made it clear to the strikers that she wasn’t a journalist working on a piece of reportage. She was a documentary maker making a film about the “convulsive changes” of the late industrial era, she tells BDE.

The new feature documentary Fire In The Mud unfolds in Unal, a rice producing village in Guinea-Bissau where the elders still have strong memories of the colonial war, lasting from 1963 to1974, in which the country fought for its independence from Portugal. But for the village’s youth, matters are somewhat different. “To them, the war was like a narrative from the past, like a fairy tale, a violent one, but really lost in the past,” Barroca tells BDE.

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.