Geoffrey Macnab

“Max and me have, for many, many years, been interested in the consequences of the photographic image and the impact of the photographic image on society,” Axel Danielson explains to BDE of their new film world-premiering at Sundance. “You could say literature is master at going inside people’s heads and showing what is going on there, but the photographic image is just amazing in showing how things play out.”

When Shere Hite’s study of female sexuality, ‘The Hite Report’, was published in the US in 1976, it became a runaway bestseller and its author was turned into a national celebrity. The work “taught me so many things I don’t think I’ve seen discussed, talked about or written about anywhere else, even to this day,” filmmaker Nicole Newnham tells Business Doc Europe.

In her new film, which won The Golden Lion in Venice and which is now in contention for an Oscar, Laura Poitras (a previous Academy Award winner with Citizenfour) shows how campaigning artist Nan Goldin, together with advocacy group PAIN, takes on the notorious Sacklers, a very wealthy family that got even richer through sales of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin.

It’s a year now since US director Alex Pritz’s Oscar contender The Territory premiered to rave reviews at Sundance. The film, which was picked up by National Geographic, explores the conflict between the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the settlers who want to cut down the trees and seize their land. Pritz explains more to BDE.

Indian filmmaker and photographer Kartiki Gonsalves grew up very close to the Mudumulai Reserve in Tamil Nadu where her remarkable short documentary was made, she explains to BDE. The film, backed by Netflix and on the Oscar trail, is about a couple who adopt an abandoned baby elephant, nurse him back to health and form a very deep bond with him in the process.

Danish producer Monica Hellström already has two Oscar noms to her credit, both for the 2021 film Flee, in the Best Doc and Best Animated Feature categories last year. Now, she is back in the running for awards, for Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters. What’s more, after more than a decade working with production company Final Cut For Real, she set up her own outfit, Ström Films, last summer.

When Daniel Roher was introduced to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Kyiv in 2020, the Canadian docmaker knew his career was set to change forever. “Once I was confronted with Navalny and this extraordinary story, I saw my destiny unfold. I knew exactly what this was going to be. I understood that this was what I had been looking for my whole life, telling a story of this magnitude and importance,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Justice is at last being served for Martha Mitchell, the woman whose Cassandra-like role in exposing the Watergate scandal has been ignored for too long. Filmmakers Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy talk to BDE about their new short doc, shortlisted for the Oscars, that tells Mitchell’s story. “She was definitely a hidden figure. She has essentially been erased from Watergate history,” suggests Alvergue.

Why now? 37 years after the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium which led to the deaths of 39 football fans at the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool FC and Juventus, four separate dramatised and doc focus on one of the darkest nights in football history. Arguably, the most high profile of the projects is Jan Verheyen and Jean-Philippe Leclaire’s docu series The Heysel Tragedy. Verheyen talks to BDE.

When film director Jay Rosenblatt’s daughter Ella turned two, be began a ritual that would last until she was 18. Every time she had a birthday, he would sit her down on the same couch and ask her pretty much the same questions. He would film her answers. Now, his 29-minute documentary How Do You Measure A Year, made from all the footage shot on Ella’s birthdays, has made it onto the short list for the Oscars.