Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.