Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.