Geoffrey Macnab

In 2020, poet, author and academic Helen Mort made a deeply troubling discovery. A friend alerted her to the fact that there were explicit photos of her on a porn site. Someone had stolen her images from social media and had used deepfake technology to superimpose her face onto bodies of other women. “With this film, the creative approach is completely in response to the ethical challenges,” director Morris says of her approach to telling Helen’s story.

Prolific Scottish producer Sonja Henrici, who will be deliberating over docs in First Film Competition in 2023, discusses her slate of new films and projects, which include Finlay Pretsell’s upcoming Douglas Gordon: Self Divided, about the maverick Turner Prize winning Scottish artist, and a brace of films on mental health, one of which, Amy Hardie’s film Untitled Love Story, had a rough cut screening earlier this week in Sheffield.

“I had been making a series about the National Trust in England and got tired of being lied to, and I thought I would go and make a series in Russia about the oligarchs,” filmmaker Patrick Forbes remembers the unlikely sequence of events more than two decades ago which led to his first meeting with Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov for the first time.

Cornwall-based filmmaker Christopher Morris talks to BDE about his debut feature, made at the ripe old age of 60 and located within a field with a single standing stone. “I can’t describe why but there is something about that field, something about the position of the stone in relation to the sea and the surrounding landscape,” the director observes of the uncanny power of the place.

In his latest film, Dutch director Marc Schmidt looks at how mental sensibilities are treated and/or prevented in different societies: the Netherlands, Norway and the US. “My interest in these themes is not just coming from my personal background, but is also intellectually motivated: what other ways are there to receive reality, than the shared reality of daily life, based on causality?”

Netherlands-based Ukrainian filmmaker Mariia Ponomarova talks about her new doc which was developed, shot and now completed in the year since Sheffield 2022. The film focuses on three windows of her old family apartment in Kyiv, as we hear the director’s mother, friends and a former lover reminiscing on the soundtrack. “It was necessary for me to do something quite quickly because it was important and dear to me. It is quite a personal story and I had to externalise it.”

Fictional newsrooms in movies don’t have half the tension and excitement of the one shown in Indian director Vinay Shukla’s feature documentary While We Watched (a UK premier in Sheffield Doc Fest’s Rebellions strand). The film follows charismatic Hindi TV news journalist Ravish Kumar, a figure with a gravitas and authority reminiscent of US journalist Ed Murrow. Director Shukla talks to Business Doc Europe.

It was a documentary expected to be made in three months. Dalton’s Dream (a world premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest on June 15) ended up taking over four years. When effervescent young pansexual Jamaican singer Dalton Harris won UK TV talent show The X-Factor in 2018, directors Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown planned to film him as he launched his career in earnest as a recording artist. Until real life in the form of acute homophobia intervened...

The doc profiles the brilliant Syrian swimmer and activist who, after an act of immense courage in helping to save a boatful of refugees off the Greek coast, was arrested three years later, after returning to Greece to help other migrants, and charged with trafficking, spying and money laundering. Director Feldman thought her film would be about the “criminalisation of humanitarian work.” But when she met her subject it became a much more complex, personal and open-ended story, she tells BDE.

The Irish doc-making duo talk about I Hate Christmas, sold by Autlook, which tells the stories of folk who don’t necessarily find those few days in late December to be the most wonderful time of the year. Wardrop and Freedman are also on the lookout for new doc projects from Ireland and beyond - and have the resources to kick start them, they tell BDE.