Geoffrey Macnab

Building a house can be a bit like making a movie. That’s what Swiss director Sophie Ballmer discovers in her documentary La Maison (a world premiere in VdR’s National Competition). Filmmaking and construction are both big, complicated endeavours with many different parts in motion at once. The filmmaker talks bricks and mortar with Business Doc Europe.

French filmmaker Geoffrey Lachassagne felt an affinity with US novelist William Faulkner from the word go. “This guy was actually talking about us…it was something I had never felt in French literature,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “Faulkner managed to capture something which rang true about my own country although he was speaking about a country with such a different history and situation.”

It’s a horrible kind of limbo. You’ve lived your entire life in a country; you’ve studied there, paid taxes and maybe even bought a house and started a family. All the time, though, you know you can be deported. This is the plight that faces the “dreamers,” the estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants brought to the US as kids. Filmmakers Stéphanie Barbey & Luc Peter explain their new film. to BDE.

Look through the range of subjects covered in the films of Swiss director Jean-Stéphane Bron (who was the subject of a VdR Masterclass April 27) and it’s hard, at least at first glance, to see how all the work fits together. “The question that remains at the end of the film gives me the idea for the next movie,” Bron explained to BDE how his documentaries are far more closely linked to one another than they may appear.

In her new film Les Oubliés de La Belle Étoile (The Lost Boys Of Mercury), Clémence Davigo tells a truly shocking story about how kids staying in a Catholic correctional facility half a century ago were beaten and humiliated by the priests in charge. The kids are now in late middle age. They want answers as to why they were treated in such brutal fashion. Davigo talks 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, also at Hot Docs, Nimik looks for other Estonians living in the same calm and contented way as her grandma.

New York-based artist and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins has been collecting physical publicity slides from movies for a number of years. These stills are used in ingenious fashion in his new project Still Film (an international premiere at Visions). As the images, some of them very familiar, are projected on screen, a voice is heard on the soundtrack talking about memory, technology and cinema. The director talks to BDE.

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.”