Geoffrey Macnab

Ahead of Dartmouth Films’ May 26 release across UK & Ireland of Alastair Evans’ A Crack in the Mountain, the company’s Christopher and Matt Hird explain the success of their approach to the release of doc, such as Margy Kinmonth’s Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War, second only (in documentary box-office terms) to Moonage Daydream in 2022. The trick is to identify the core audience and find a route to that audience. “If the core audience likes it, they spread the word to a wider audience,” Matt Hird explains.

Portuguese Catarina Mourão’s new doc, world premiering at Visions du Réel, looks at an extraordinary, long concealed chapter in the life of its protagonist, Martim Santa Rita Masasri. Now in his late 50s, Martim was 15 he went to live and study in the Soviet Union, in Astrakan where he discovered sex and alcohol and fell deeply in love. When he returned to Portugal he bore deep psychological scars. The director explains more to BDE.

Argentinean director Pedro Speroni discusses his latest documentary, which concerns the charismatic Iván Bilbaos whom the director met when making his previous documentary Rancho (2021), set inside a maximum security prison. Now Bilbaos is out of jail and back with his wife and daughter, making a living as a money lender. “I think it is a film about a guy who is trying to get ahead,” the director says. “Like a boxer, he is always fighting to have a better life.”

It’s clear that Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke sees traces of himself as a youngster in the 13-year-old Bo, the effervescent main character of his new feature documentary Planet B, a world premiere in Grand Angle at Visions du Réel. She is a teenage climate activist who, together with her friend Luca, throws herself into protests. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

It’s an area of bleak, windswept majesty. The border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan has rolling mountains and long, dry plains. It has been the site of constant skirmishes including a 44-day war in 2020. It is also the location for Daniel Kötter’s Landshaft, and the latest of several projects by the German artist and filmmaker that have dealt with what he calls ‘political geography,’ he tells BDE.

Swiss-Canadian director Peter Mettler discusses his epic new feature series While the Green Grass Grows, which is expected eventually to run for up to 12 hours. Parts one and six are an elegy for his parents, whose passing they chronicle. “For me, it’s…almost a way of going through that process; of becoming an orphan, being an only child as well and [with] no other family. It was very much a separation from my family,” the director reflects to BDE on the loss he experienced.

It sounds like something out of a Michael Mann film. Iván Simonovis, formerly one of Venezuela’s top police officers, is under strict house arrest on trumped up charges. He cuts off the security tag on his ankle, clambers down a very high wall, is spirited away by well-wishers, goes into hiding and eventually escapes Venezuela on a speed boat. His son Iván discusses with BDE the film he made of his father’s extraordinary life.

Welcome to Funky Town, the hippest club in Chengdu, China, and the centre of the city’s thriving underground party scene. The documentary came about after Yihao, one of director Mullinkosson’s most flamboyant friends, discovered he was a filmmaker. “He asked when I would film him. I said how about Saturday night?” the director tells BDE.

“I think I decided 10 years ago that I was done with filming…that there was no reason for a guy like me to go around capturing [images] Robert Flaherty-style,” maverick Swedish co-director Göran Hugo Olsson tells BDE. He wanted to collaborate, so when the opportunity to work with artist Roxy Farhat came along, he grabbed it with both hands. “And the rest is history,” says Farhat.

Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim has been in Copenhagen this week with his new feature, Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, about the eponymous Hollywood star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1990s. “When Michael and I started working together, he asked for only one thing…The thing he asked for is no violins. He didn’t want a maudlin, pitying film about a person with a sickness,” Guggenheim tells BDE.