Geoffrey Macnab

When Dr Adelheid Heftberger spoke to Business Doc Europe, it was just a few hours after her keynote speech last week at Leipzig’s DOK Archive market. “I wanted to explain a little bit the position of film archive in terms of access, and what happens in the background,” Heftberger [Head of Film Access, film dept of the German Bundesarchiv in Berlin] said of her address to the professional audience.

With over 1,300 film professionals in attendance every year, Ji.hlava IDFF is a key meeting place for the world doc industry, and the most important documentary hub in Central and Eastern Europe, even for US doccers. Head of Industry Jarmila Outratová guides Business Doc Europe though a programme jam-packed with new projects, the promotion of new production talent and a major market for CEE documentary output.

Festival boss Marek Hovorka talks to Business Doc Europe on the eve of the 26th Ji.hlava IDFF, which kicks off October 25, running through to October 30. Hovorka describes the leading Czech festival as “a documentary Woodstock.” It may now be 26-years-old but it still has the same freewheeling idealism that characterised the event when it was launched in 1997, he points out.

Making one film is a challenge. Doing six at once is something that could easily drive even hardened and experienced producers to the verge of breakdown. Nonetheless, showrunners Vincent Coen and Guillaume Vandenberghe, together with producer Hanne Phlypo of Belgian outfit, Clin d’oeil films, are in the final stages of completing their epic series Draw For Change, which they discuss with BDE.

Gereon Wetzel and Melanie Liebheit’s kitchen-based documentary is satisfyingly unusual in its choice of subject. Whereas filmmakers generally focus on the head chef in a restaurant, theirs follows the apprentice chef Agnes, highly talented but very much at the bottom of the food chain. Wetzel and Liebheit serve up answers to Business Doc Europe.

Pepe Danquart discusses his new documentary, about the international acclaimed German artist Daniel Richte. “He has a great knowledge about painting, about the history of art. He knows a lot about politics. He reads regularly the newspapers. He has a certain approach to reality,” the director tells BDE of his subject’s intelligence and very wide frame of reference.

Take three brilliant young female photographers living and working in the GDR in the 1980s. All are desperate for artistic freedom but all are running up against a brutal political system. And the Stasi secret police are harassing them and monitoring their every move. The artists in question are the subjects of Rebels, the world-premiering feature documentary of Pamela Meyer-Arndt, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

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.