Geoffrey Macnab

The new documentary, world-premiering at AJB DOC, concerns two titans of football in the Balkans, specifically Sarajevo - Vahidin and Husref Musemić. “These are two knights who made not only FK Sarajevo famous, but also the city of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, even Yugoslavia,” enthuses co-director Edin Isanović to Business Doc Europe.

The shocking and extraordinary story of Japanese reality TV star Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, who was left alone naked in a room for 15 months and whose every move was watched on television by the Japanese public, is told in The Contestant, the startling new documentary by UK director Clair Titley, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

Intrepid 52-year-old Bosnian athlete and filmmaker Tomislav Cvitanušić, a basketball star in Sarajevo as a youngster, recently made climbing Everest, the world’s highest mountain, his goal. His ascent is chronicled in new documentary, The Deepest Summit, screening this weekend at AJB Doc. Was there an ulterior motive? “To steal some of the media space from the everyday politics that is always quite pessimistic in the Balkans,” he tells BDE.

Parma-based filmmaker Matteo Ferrarini explains that Spring in Mariupol (screening in Competition in AJB Doc) is intended to give a very different perspective on the Ukrainian war than that provided by most of the western mainstream media. Many western journalists visited Mariupol during the siege but most left after a couple of days. Maurizio stayed put for the whole of the spring, he tells BDE, trying to understand what the city’s residents were enduring. The siege lasted until late May.

Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost world-premiering in Venice, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists” director Morabito tells BDE of his subject.

Queer feminist filmmaker Julia Fuhr Mann freely admits that she loves sports. She watches football and athletics. What infuriates her, though, is the gender stereotyping in the TV sports coverage and the patronising attitude toward queer, trans and intersex athletes. The director discusses her debut feature doc with Business Doc Europe.

The legendary Hollywood filmmaker is profiled in the new documentary by UK docmaker Matthew Wells, who has previously profiled other such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick. “I was really…interested in the symbolism of Frank Capra’s rags to riches story, what it came to mean and how that resonates with his movies,” Wells tells BDE of his contradictory subject.

Almost 50 years ago, the Oscar-winning French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau turned up at Panama’s San Blas islands intending to make a film about the Kuna community there. But the film was never shown, and more or less forgotten about until, quite by accident, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot heard of its existence and determined not only to track it down but to finally screen it to the Kuna folk half a century later.

Petra Seliškar’s Body, about her lifelong friendship with her best friend Urška both in their carefree days and after Urška was struck down by auto-immune disease, has its Macedonian premiere August 21 following its world-premiere last week in Sarajevo. “I tried to focus on the inner development of [Urška’s] disease…her inner struggle and what really happened to her body,” Seliškar tells Business Doc Europe.

In their debut feature doc My Muslim Husband the filmmakers, a married couple, turn their camera on themselves. “In the beginning, I thought it was going to be easy. We would film something and then we would have a movie. That was not the case. It was much more complicated,” Lizeta observes to BDE of what turned out to be a deeply personal and complex affair.