Geoffrey Macnab

The prolific Dutch docmaking couple discuss their latest film, shot during lockdown and very close to home. “We had always wondered what it would be like to make a film…in the garden,” says co-director Petra. “We couldn’t stand the idea that we wouldn’t have work during the Covid period.”

One pitch warmly received in the IDFA Forum this week was for Motherland [working title], the new documentary by Danish directors Kristoffer Juel and Christian Als. As Juel explains to Business Doc Europe, the idea for the project dates back to 2015 when he and Als, who are photojournalists, had gone to Mongolia to film the Neo-Nazi gangs then thriving there.

The subjects of Maryam Ebrahimi’s Forum doc, produced by Stina Gardell of Swedish outfit Mantaray Film, are the Kurdish guerrillas who fought in the war against ISIS and Turkey. “I was wondering how these guerrillas, mostly women, can fight face to face with the most brutal men in the world, ISIS men. I wanted to be close to them and to see how they could get this power,” Ebrahimi tells BDE.

Swedish producer director Viktor Nordenskiöld discovered the refugee subjects for his new project Lust For Life (pitched earlier this week at the IDFA Forum) in unlikely fashion on the beach in Lesbos in Greece. He was there with The United Nations Commission on Human Rights. As he gazed over the sand, he couldn’t help but be struck that one of the young men struggling across the sand had the other on his shoulder.

“The name is Bond…James Bond.” “Hey, me too!” Paris-based sales outfit Reservoir Docs arrives at this year’s IDFA handling a Bond movie with a difference. Its new film The Other Fellow directed by Matthew Bauer explores just what it is like to share a name with the most popular spy in movie history. Company boss Anaïs Clanet gets shaken (but not stirred) with Business Doc Europe.

Berlin-based Ukrainian artist and filmmaker Mila Teshaieva gives a vivid and horrific description of what it was like coming to Bucha for the first time after the city was liberated from Russian troops last April. She had to drive very carefully and slowly, zig-zagging to avoid the corpses. “I felt it was surreal,” she recalls to BDE. “you can’t understand at all how it is possible in the 21st Century.”

Dutch director Coco Schrijber discusses her film that portrays three women who survived abusive relationships - by becoming murderers themselves. “I have no history of violence in my family and my relationships,” Schrijber dismisses the idea she is drawing on her own experiences. Nonetheless, she was driven to make her movie by “the astonishing amount of women who are killed every year by their partners.”

Autlook boss Salma Abdalla outlines to Business Doc Europe the highlights of her IDFA 2022 slate, which includes the recent pick-up, My Name Is Happy, a world premiere in Frontlight and directed by Nick Read and Ayse Toprak; One In A Million, the new doc by Jack MacInnes and Iota Azzam, and three Oscar hopefuls, Three Minutes - A Lengthening, Myanmar Diaries and Sirens by Rita Baghdadi.

There can be few films in IDFA this year as disturbing as The Lost Souls Of Syria, a world premiere in the festival’s Frontlight section. Directed by Stéphane Malterre and Garance Le Caisne, the film tells the story of the thousands of people tortured and killed by the Assad regime in Syria and of the agonising battle for justice fought by their relatives and friends. The filmmakers explain the work to BDE.

“We have taken some hits,” a weary-looking stuntwoman sighs early on in Elena Avdija’s debut feature doc Cascadeuses (Stuntwomen), an international premiere at IDFA. The film, sold internationally by Andana, recently won the Focus Competition at the Zurich Film Festival. “We had this question, who are the few women who do this job and what are they facing in their lives,” the director tells BDE.