Geoffrey Macnab

“This year, it is quite obvious that filmmakers have gone out again, looking further…it was possible again after the lockdowns to go out into the world,” the Leipzig boss tells BDE about one of the trends within his 2023 programme. He also fulfils a longstanding ambition in 2023. For the first time, DOK Leipzig will host an International Competition for animated film.

“The ongoing success of Swedish documentaries owes a lot to co-production forums and festivals such as Nordisk Panorama,” SFI Doc Film Commissioner Anna Weitz tells BDE. “For Nordic filmmakers, the Nordisk Panorama is the one where concrete collaborations take off…it is really the place to go to pitch a project that can turn it into a Nordic co-production.”

Iris Olsson is one of two documentary commissioners at the Finnish Film Foundation. That means she is gatekeeper, assessing which projects will receive support from the Foundation. “In our strategy, we support diversity. With the means we have, we are trying to help upcoming artists to start their career; we are trying to get the international hits; we are trying to tackle the big, current subjects,” she tells BDE.

Fiction? Documentary? For prolific Danish producer Rikke Tambo Andersen, CEO of Tambo Film, both forms are equally appealing. “It’s two very different ways of thinking, both creatively but also financially,” Andersen tells BDE of the contrast between dramas and docs. “It keeps me on my toes creatively.” Andersen is at the Nordisk Panorama this week with two of her new doc projects in the Forum.

In Bresky’s latest film she tells the story of a group of Sámi artists who , back in the 1970s, formed a collective and became involved in protests against the building of a massive hydroelectric dam which threatened to obliterate their community. “I think I bring a part of Sámi culture, history and heritage and give it to the Sámi people,” Bresky reflects to BDE on one of her main goals in making the documentary.

After rave reviews at Hot Docs, Icelandic filmmaker Gaukur Úlfarsson’s new doc is in Nordic Competition at Nordisk Panorama 2023. He talks to BDE about the “near genius” artist and provocateur Ragnar Kjartansson who, in 2021, had the madcap idea to recreate American soap opera Santa Barbara in Russia. But then the war happened. “Putin didn’t just invade Ukraine. He also invaded this documentary. He invaded everything!” says Úlfarsson.

Now in her early 70s, Sigrun Gunnarsdóttir is one of the most admired artists currently working on the Faroe Islands. The simplicity of her paintings is deceptive. She uses allegory and symbolism in a subtle and disarming way. Co-director Marianna Mørkøre discusses her film, which includes stop-motion animation, with BDE. “We felt that if we were making a different kind of documentary,” she says.

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.