Geoffrey Macnab

The momentum behind Myanmar Diaries, which Dutch-based outfit Zindoc co-produced on behalf of the anonymous Myanmar Film Collective, continues to grow. The film deals with life following the brutal military coup of February 2021. “We are a super underdog effort, but it still feels that if this film could get a proper spotlight, we could move mountains when it comes to policy,” says Zindoc’s Petr Lom, partner of producer Corinne van Egeraat.

They seem to come from different sides of the filmmaking universe. Robert Downey Sr (1936-2021) was one of the high priests of US underground movies, famous for his anarchic and satirical humour. His son, Robert Downey Jr, 57, is one of the highest paid mainstream movie stars in history. Their relationship is the subject of Chris Smith’s Netflix doc “Sr” which has just launched on Netflix. The director explains all to BDE.

Margaret Brown’s new documentary looks at the legacy of suffering and injustice left by The Clotilda, the last ship to carry African captives to the US – even though legislation prohibiting the importation of slaves had been written and passed over 50 years before. Brown and co-producer, co-writer and folklorist, Dr. Kern Jackson spoke to Business Doc Europe about their film during the recent IDFA.

Family Affair Films producer Floor Onrust talks to Business Doc Europe about the remarkable feature documentary, directed by Bianca Stigter, which analyses, re-analyses and then analyses again three minutes of pre-WW2 home footage showing the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish town of Nasielsk. The archive is unbearably poignant as only a few years later most of the town’s inhabitants would be massacred by the Nazis.

When a former US Marine plots a terrorist attack on a small-town American mosque, he undergoes a radical change when he comes face-to-face with the Muslins he had set out to kill. He is literally disarmed by their kindness. Stranger At The Gate is the latest in a long series of short films Joshua Seftel has made about Muslims in the US, post-9/11. “I felt maybe I could do something with my filmmaking to counter this hatred that Muslims were facing,” he tells BDE.

A change in Californian law allowed Eli Timoner to end his own life. The founder of Air Florida was in his early 90s, paralysed and in pain. He wanted to die on his own terms. His daughter, documentary maker Ondi Timoner, recorded his final 15 days in her new documentary, Last Flight Home (released in the US by MTV Documentary Films). “I thought I have to film him, I have to interview him…I have to record his final moments on earth,” she tells BDE.

Hidden Letters may ostensibly be about Nushu, an old secret Chinese language used by women to communicate among themselves in periods of patriarchal oppression when they were prevented from reading and writing. Its real subject, however, is the situation of women in China today, co-director Violet Du Feng tells BDE. “It’s a film about them…about the challenges they are facing.”

The story of the Janes collective, a secret network which operated in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s to provide abortions, is told in a hard-hitting new HBO-backed documentary from Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. It is a film that seems all the more topical given the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe vs Wade. “We were hoping the film would speak to a past history but it turns out it speaks to a very present grim reality,” says Lessin.

When a well-meaning western non-profit GiveDirectly became the benefactors of Kogutu, a village in Kenya, paying every adult inhabitant with $22 a month, matters didn’t turn out quite as the western agency had hoped. Sold by Dogwoof, the film had its European premiere IDFA Frontlight section. Directors Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko talk hard cash with BDE.

Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez may have been born in Moscow but she describes herself as a Costa Rican, Chilean, Iraqi filmmaker. In her IDFA Award-winning film she uses personal archival artefacts to construct both a loving portrait of her exiled father, theatre director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin, and an elegy for the homeland of Iraq to which they can never return. “This film especially I dedicate to Iraq…but also to Chile,” Ishtar says.