Geoffrey Macnab

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.  

Sales doyenne Salma Abdalla talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the May 24 world premiere of Asmae el Moudir’s new documentary in Un Certain Regard. “We’ve seen a lot of very strong documentaries from the Arab world,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “The Mother Of All Lies is pushing the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.”

Originally founded by Greg Rubidge in 2009, Toronto-based Syndicado is an increasingly prominent player in the documentary sales world. Aleksandar Govedarica co-founded the company’s world sales arm, which he runs out of Europe, in 2016. “I really love cinema, that is why I am in the business,” Govedarica tells BDE. “When people ask me how do we acquire films, I think it really comes down to instinct.”

German-Italian Anita Pallenberg was a model, movie star and muse to The Rolling Stones, and a seminal figure in 60’s counterculture. “She was doing what very few women did, casting off her family, casting off everyone and just saying I am going to be a self-made woman. I am going to make my own money. I am going to travel the world,” Bloom tells BDE of the subject of her new co-directed doc, narrated by Scarlett Johansson.