Geoffrey Macnab

Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert talk to BDE about their new doc which, in turn, focuses on the work of a rehabilitation centre for victims of war, a Ukrainian transgender artist and dancer now living in Poland, and the Open Group artistic collective that explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian civilians. “I think we were quite sensitive observers,” says co-director Englert who, with Szumowska, learned the power of quiet observation when studying film in Łódź. “That’s the way of storytelling we always favour. Without words, you can say a lot.”

One of eccentric artist Arek Pasożyt’s pet obsessions is to find traces of the Tatra Mountains Panorama, a long-lost massive painting from the 1890s that was 115 metres long and 16 metres high - but that was broken up. In Bigger Picture, world-premiering at MDAG, Polish director Mikołaj Janik follows Arek on this journey. The artist is strongly left-wing, Janik tells BDE. He doesn’t believe in consumer culture, and he is relentlessly cheerful, refusing to become downcast about setbacks. He further likens him to an ancient knight on a heroic quest, or to “some kind of Indiana Jones…”

The Spanish Civil War has a strong personal resonance for director Ricardo Iscar. Back then, four bodies of workers murdered by the Falangists were buried in a field owned by his family in Salamanca. In the documentary, these bodies are finally being exhumed, and Iscar is there to film the process. Seeing how viciously the war divided Spain in the 1930s, Iscar has a warning for viewers: “Nothing is guaranteed. The democracy and civil rights we have, we have to fight to keep them…”

In his feature debut, new graduate Felix Lange follows Eastern European lorry drivers on strike in Germany, their action prompted by anger at allegedly unpaid wages. The context is grim. Over 300,000 drivers from these countries work in the EU - and many are being viciously exploited. At first, some of the striking drivers were wary of Lange in their presence. “But then suddenly I met this very close group of 10 Georgians and they took me in…” he tells BDE.

In 1996, intrepid Swedish freelance journalist Erling Söderström was part of an expedition into the Amazon jungle with Brazilian ethnographer and social activist, Sydney Possuelo. They were trying to make “first contact” with the Korubo Indians. As we see in Nathan Grossman’s new feature doc, 30 years on the footage makes for highly uncomfortable viewing, with the encounter seeming both awkward and exploitative. “It shows what enormous risks there are in relationship to these contact events,” Grossman tells BDE. “It’s also why, today, these kind of situations should be avoided to the largest extent we can.”

After he read Joe Kane’s classic piece of travel journalism ‘Running The Amazon,’ about how, in the mid- 1980s, eleven intrepid Europeans set off on an epic journey by kayak across the entire length of the Amazon river, Polish director Rafał Skalski was immediately smitten. “When I read the book, I decided it was a great theme for documentary,” he tells BDE. “What intrigued me most was that the foreground was dominated by what was happening between the people [on the trip], the emotions, conflicts and relationships.”

In Freak Show, Lukasz Ronduda and Filip Pawlak work with a group of disabled performers as they prepare for a show at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. The idea was to explore different ways in which they could represent the disabled body on stage while reflecting on the pain and contradictions of disabled life. It is a work that forces audiences to confront their preconceptions and prejudices about disabled bodies. Pawlak discusses the film with BDE.

Early on, director Florian Heinzen-Ziob thought he would be traveling around the globe, meeting scientists at important institutions in different continents, in making his documentary about the climate crisis. But then he decided it would be a little perverse to roam so far so far afield when his subject was climate change. It made more sense, he eventually decided, to stay closer to home. “In Germany, it was much more easy because I could just do everything by train,” he tells BDE.

Tin Castle may have been presented as a Work-in-Progress in Nyon this week but audiences won’t have long to wait for the completed feature. The French-Irish co-production (previously titled A Road Less Travelled) will have its world premiere in Critics’ Week in Cannes next month. In the doc, director Alexander Murphy follows the O’Reillys, an Irish traveller family living in a fixed caravan. French producer Cosme Bongrain explains more…

My Skin And I, the new project from artists and filmmakers Milton Guillén and Fiona Guy Hall, is generating buzz even before its completion. It won two awards at VDR Industry this week after being presented in the works in progress section, and has already secured funding from both US and European sources. “The project really lives in this space where the political intersects with the personal and [looks at] how these two aspects of our lives are fundamentally intertwined,” Guy Hall tells BDE.