Geoffrey Macnab

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.

Holding Moses, shortlisted for the Short Documentary Oscar, is a deeply personal project for filmmaker Rivkah Beth Medow, she explains to Business Doc Europe. It follows Medow’s partner, dancer Randi Rader, as she learns to live with her young son’s severe disability. Medow directed the film alongside Jen Rainin with whom she founded Frankly Speaking Films.

Ben Proudfoot (whose Queen Of Basketball won the Oscar for Short Doc in 2022) has two more shorts in contention for 2023. Mink! concerns Japanese-American politician Patsy Mink who was behind the groundbreaking legislation which banned sex discrimination in education programmes, while The Best Chef In The World is about pioneering Californian chef, Sally Schmitt, founder of the revered restaurant, The French Laundry.

Ryan White’s Good Night Oppy tells the story of the two Mars robot rovers, Opportunity [“Oppy’] and Spirit sent to the red planet in 2003 on what was intended to be a 90-day fact-finding tour. Over time, the NASA scientists formed an emotional attachment with the robots and the doc is somewhat of an unlikely tearjerker. “This was my [first] film about non-humans but it was the same - I treated it like any of my character-based films,” White tells BDE.