Geoffrey Macnab

As British Pathé’s Simon Witter explains to Business Doc Europe on the eve of DOK Leipzig’s inaugural Archive Market, the sector continues to enjoy a boom time. “The year that just closed was the busiest we’ve ever had…We’re on a high at the moment,” he says.

The UK-based Imperial War Museums will be on the front line during DOK Leipzig’s Archive Market, representing a collection with 25,000 hours of moving images. “People think of us as a military collection but really our collection reflects life in the 20th and early 21st century,” Film Curator Fiona Kelly tells BDE. “We’re trying to get people to think of us a resource for social and cultural history as well as military history.”

You won’t find many bigger collections at DOK Leipzig Archive market than that of Sweden’s SVT Archives. It has over 400,000 hours of material in its vaults. Some of this is very recent. Some dates right back to the birth of cinema in 1896. Maria Bergmark talks Business Doc Europe through the SVT offer. “It’s not just from Sweden but from all over the world,” she says.

Elizabeth Klinck can justly be called one of the doyennes of the film archive world. She will be at DOK Leipzig for the inaugural edition of the DOK Archive Market, kicking off today, Oct 20, where she will also be chairing case studies and a masterclass. Before all that, she took time to expound on her life in the sector with BDE.  

The prolific Flemish doc producer Diplodokus attends CONNEXT with two series projects, the 4-part work-in-progress DNA, about the ongoing genetic revolution, and the completed 3-part series Catching the Pirate King which looks at how Belgian police became involved in the apprehension of leading Somalian pirates and helped put them on trial. Both series are co-directed by Maarten and Lennart Stuyck, who talks to BDE.

Jazz and Cold War politics are intimately entwined in Flemish director Johan Grimonprez’s latest doc feature, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a work-in-progress at CONNEXT. The film explores the circumstances which led to musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach staging their own protest at the UN against the murder of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. The director talks to BDE.

Flemish DJ and filmmaker Pascal Garnier remembers vividly the circumstances in which he first watched the Dutch-made 1986 music documentary Big Fun In The Big Town, which featured artists like Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and Run-DMC. As a teenager looking for his own “thing and identity,” he was strongly influenced by the film’s “direct and intimate view of what it was like in New York back then,” he tells BDE.

DOK Leipzig (17-23 October) is a festival for documentary…and for animated film. Ask artistic director Christoph Terhechte about his choice of opening film for the 65th edition and he suggests that the “animated” part of the proposition is sometimes overlooked. Hence the decision to go for Alain Ughetto’s animated feature No Dogs Or Italians Allowed in 2022.

Fernando Sulichin has been working with Oliver Stone for going on 20 years. He has enabled Stone to make documentaries about some of the most colourful and contentious figures in contemporary world politics. One of their latest collaborations, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, screened in Doclisboa a few days ago, where BDE caught up with the Argentinean-born maverick.

The stereotype of the climate activist is of an Extinction Rebellion-style protester, dressed like an old hippy, holding up the traffic in a busy city centre or blockading the petrol pumps. Roger Cox, the protagonist of Nic Balthazar’s new film Duty Of Care, screening online at CONNEXT 2022, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.