Geoffrey Macnab

A few days after the Russian invasion last year, Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela began driving into Ukraine to pick up civilians and bring them to the Polish border. The footage he shot of his many journeys is brought together in his new documentary, selected for Cannes ACID and Millennium Docs Against Gravity (Poland). “We were trying to concentrate on the human stories and not to be splashing the screen with fear and war,” the director tells BDE. “This is not a typical film shot in the trenches…”

It’s an irony, but what critics are calling one of the most perceptive films about British life in the wake of Brexit was actually made by a…German. Jens Meurer’s Seaside Special has been warmly received at festivals in the UK while also turning into a surprise hit in Germany. “Continentals love the British. We want the Brits, we need the Brits,” Meurer tells BDE of the surprising levels of affection that still exist toward the UK across the EU.

Serbian street photographer Boogie (aka Vladimir Milivojevich) goes where other artists fear to tread. He is also the subject of Ivan Šijak’s new feature documentary Boogie & Demons, a world premiere in Serbian Competition at Beldocs this week. “He has three cameras that he shoots all the time. He is like some grown-up kid. He still has this energy of a teenager,” the director says of his prolific subject.

What makes a nice, young middle-class Dutch woman want to join a revolutionary struggle thousands of miles from home? Marcel Mettelsiefen’s probing new feature doc tells the story of Tanja Nijmeijer, the former teacher who became a member of the Colombian FARC rebel group. “It is a film which gives a voice to a conflict in a country which is divided, a country stuck in 50 years of violence… told through the emotional story of Tanja,” the director tells BDE.

Paula Maľárová tells BDE how many fellow Slovakians convince themselves that they will not "repeat the mistakes" of previous generations. But, as her doc shows, war still permeates every part of Slovakian society, with numerous film and TV dramas on the subject and military parades and exercises. Yet almost everyone treats these activities as if they are games, she says. In her new film Maľárová sets out to show the distorted way in which children are being taught “what war is.”

Filmmaker and journalist Katja Baumgarten tells the fraught and complex story of a midwife (and advocate of home deliveries) who was put on trial following the still-birth of a baby. “Who will it help to send the midwife and doctor to prison for years?” Baumgarten, also a midwife, stresses to BDE of the “crazy” jail sentence that the court laid down. “It wasn’t reality. It was the fantasy of the judges,” she alleges.

It’s 25 years since Esther van Messel founded First Hand Films, her Zurich-based world sales, distribution and production outfit. “To be commercial and subversive at the same time, to change the world and have fun doing it,” is the van Messel mantra. Now she is marking the company’s quarter century anniversary with the launch of the First Hand Fund Diversity Call, a fund valued at €25,000. She explains all to BDE.

Seven or eight years ago, after her grandmother died, Estonian filmmaker Liis Nimik began to think deeply about the life the old lady had lived. Her grandmother certainly wasn’t wealthy but she “always had everything she needed and peace in her heart,” Nimik observes to BDE. In her new documentary Sundial, which world-premiered at Visions du Réel, Nimik looks for other Estonians living in the same calm and contented way as her grandma.

A badly neglected episode in recent German history is the injustice meted out to Mozambicans who travelled to the GDR to work and study during the Cold War but who were forced to head back to Africa when the Wall came down. “I was shocked and I didn’t know about it,” director Brenda Akele Jorde tells Business Doc Europe. “Germany just doesn’t talk about it.”

The Czech director went to the Arctic settlement of Longyearbyen to film the work of social scientist, Zdenka Sokolícková, who was studying the impact of climate change on the local people. “From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to tell a rather an intimate story seen from the perspective of Zdenka…But I couldn’t know at the time how the story would develop…” the filmmaker tells BDE.