Geoffrey Macnab

When, 12 years ago, Goran Dević turned up at a railway station in the Balkans to start filming a bitter strike, he thought he was simply doing research for a fiction script. Little did he know it would turn into a feature doc selected for Sarajevo Doc Competition. “They opened themselves to me from the first moment they saw me,” Dević remembers of the union leaders he got to know. “After that, I stayed with them.”

“I was lucky to meet these amazing people who opened their lives to me, their personalities and their universe,” director Giorgi Parkosadze tells BDE of Guri and his mother Sanata, living in a remote mountainous gorge in Georgia and the subjects of the documentary Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer, screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition.

“Kiss the future!” rock star Bono of band U2 shouted at the crowd during the historic concert in Sarajevo in 1997. The city was then emerging from siege and war. It was time, the Irishman was telling them, to look forward after the years of horror. The story behind the concert, and how it happened, is told in the feature doc directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and written by Bill S Carter, who speaks to Business Doc Europe.

Gutweniger and Kofler’s new documentary, which world-premieres in Locarno Critics Week, observes the behind-the-scenes labour within Italy's Northern Adriatic coastal resorts, both in and out of season. The filmmakers are surprisingly formal in their approach, with their use of a static camera. “We wanted to stand still and watch,” Kofler says. “Everything was rushing and craziness but we wanted stay still in a certain way.”

Represented internationally by Cargo Film & Releasing, Angelos Rallis’ feature doc, about a young orphan who must survive the apocalyptic flooding within Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra region, has been winning awards wherever it has shown. Following its premiere at the Thessaloniki Doc Fest, it recently picked up two prizes at the Giffoni Film Festival. The director discusses the film with BDE.

Stéphane Breton finds subjects for his documentaries “by chance,” he tells Business Doc Europe. The idea for his latest feature Les Premiers Jours [The First Days] came in haphazard fashion after he was invited to the film school in Santiago do Chile. “I discovered the shore, the ocean and I decided to make a film there,” the director remembers. “I am really interested in the relationship between a place and the people.”

After many years as a successful producer Emma Hindley felt like a “poacher turned gamekeeper,” she tells BDE on taking up the role Lead Commissioning Editor at BBC Storyville (the strand that showcases the best in international documentary). “I had always viewed Storyville from afar and thought it was a real jewel in the crown at the BBC.”

Docs Ireland programmer Stuart Sloan talked to Business Doc Europe about the Belfast-based, all-Ireland international doc festival which, in a few short years, has established itself as a core showcase for Irish and international docs and talent, and as an important pitching hub for new projects and forum for debate. Docs Ireland runs June 20-25.

“I knew that he was funny going into it, but I didn’t realise how funny,” producer-director Stuart McClave tells BDE of the wisecracking Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena and the subject of the new feature documentary On The Line: The Richard Williams Story (which had its UK premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest over the weekend following its Tribeca premiere).

Get back, hands off, go for it! Producer Simon Halfon discusses his new feature length doc about the great 1980s band Wham, which featured 'young guns' George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. As soon as he pitched his idea, Halfon knew the film was a goer. “Within a heartbeat, we had this dream team of Chris Smith, John Battsek and Kate Townsend (Netflix),” he says.