Geoffrey Macnab

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.

It’s 44 years now since American preacher Jim Jones presided over the notorious mass-murder/suicide in which over 900 people died, most by taking poison, in a settlement in Guyana. Now, Czech director Jan Bušta has used the 1978 Jonestown massacre as the starting point for his radical new documentary, world premiering in Jihlava. The director explains talks to BDE.

Czech filmmaker Victor Portel tells Business Doc Europe about his new doc, screening in International and Czech Joy competitions, concerning Vladimir Dzuro, an ex-Prague detective turned International Criminal Tribunal investigator, whose painstaking research led to the arrest of a notorious war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.

US performance artist, writer and filmmaker Andrea Kleine talks to Business Doc Europe about her film in which she performs to an empty theatre, the same one she and her partner Bobby Previte holed up in during quarantine. “That was the crux of the film. How do you recreate that feeling of ‘live’ when nobody is there?” she muses.