Geoffrey Macnab

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.

Greta Stocklassa’s feature doc, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, profiles Hans Blix, the Swedish politician who was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the man charged with the responsibility of determining whether or not Saddam Hussein was harbouring WMDs post-9/11. The director discusses Blix with BDE.

The Netflix doc follows the painstaking investigations of Rae de Leon into the disturbing number of cases of young women across the US who report sexual assault to the police, only to end up being charged themselves. “Rae absolutely doesn’t give up. She is totally pragmatic, she is polite always…and she is just so persistent,” Schwartzman tells BDE of the “self-effacing and humble” journalist.