Geoffrey Macnab

Dutch Nirit Peled discusses her new doc, world premiering at IDFA, about the nightmare situation suffered by mothers whose sons are placed on the crime prevention lists drawn up by the authorities. “Intuitively, I felt there was something very interesting and very filmic in looking through parental eyes at youth criminality,” the director says.

Dutch/Croatian director Biserka Šuran discusses her new documentary which examines her Balkan roots, and those of her Croatian father, a man who feels he is “floating” between two cultures since emigrating to the Netherlands after the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia. The film world premieres at IDFA 2022.

“I don’t know why but we are obsessed with ethnicity here.” With her new doc All You See, produced by mint film office and world premiering as IDFA opening film, director Niki Padidar hopes to make Dutch audiences aware of the way they look at newcomers, and how their preconceptions can affect others often without them even realising it.

The Polish director talks to Business Doc Europe about her feature documentary which world premieres at IDFA 2022. Produced by Esther van Messel, the film follows Antek, a very conservative, very Catholic young man whose personal world is defined by both nationalism and celibacy. But little by little, he becomes curious about the outer world, and especially about the women in it…

Much Ado About Dying is a documentary with very unlikely origins, British documentary maker Simon Chambers tells BDE. The original idea had been to make a movie called Carmageddon about traffic congestion and climate change in Delhi. Instead, Chambers left the traffic fumes in India far behind and ended up back in London, looking after his uncle David, whose health was failing.

London-based German filmmaker Eva Weber was never an Angela Merkel supporter, but she was always an admirer. “What I’ve really come to admire is her fact-based, pragmatic, reasoned, compromise-seeking approach that is so in contrast to the populist leaders of our world,” the director tells Business Doc Europe. Weber’s new film Merkel receives its European premiere at IDFA.

Khaled Jarrar’s documentary (a world premiere at IDFA) is a refugee story with a difference. The Palestinian artist and director joined a family fleeing the Syrian war on their nightmarish trip across Europe. He wasn’t a news reporter, exploiting their predicament for headlines. He was their friend, looking on at events with their eyes, sharing their hunger, cold and humiliation as well as their fury. He explains more to BDE.

Due to hit Netflix on 11 November and exec-produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, Elvis Mitchell’s whistle stop tour of Black US cinema is now being tipped as a potential Oscar contender. Originally conceived as a book, no publisher was interested. But Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen saw matters differently. “I don’t think that is a book,” McQueen said. “I think it is a documentary.”

The Armenian genocide has been explored in several films in recent years: in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014) and Terry George’s The Promise (2016). Now, one of the most traumatic and bitterly contested episodes in early 20th Century history is revisited in Aurora’s Sunrise, the remarkable new documentary by Armenian director Inna Sahakyan, who talks to BDE.

In her new film Those Who Dance In The Dark which screened in Ji.hlava’s Czech Joy Competition (as well as winning the Best Documentary Feature at the Warsaw Festival), Czech filmmaker Jana Ševčíková looks at the lives of young blind people. As the director acknowledges to BDE, however, her first idea was to make the film about their guide dogs.