Geoffrey Macnab

Documentaries feature very prominently in this year’s hybrid edition of CONNEXT, the annual showcase for features and TV series made in Flanders and Brussels. As far as Flanders Audiovisual Fund Koen Van Bockstal is concerned, that is exactly as it should be. ““In documentaries, you give a voice to authors who can actually give their vision, their interpretation and their concerns about what is happening in the world.”

It’s still a hugely sensitive and inflammatory subject which few in Belgium dare to talk about. In the summer of 1942, the local police assisted the Nazi forces as they rounded up Jews in raids across Antwerp. These Jews were deported and many died in Hitler’s death camps. The grim episode is the subject of The Last Jewish Summer, a feature documentary which Thom M. Vander Beken is pitching at CONNEXT.

Spanish director Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel profiles his beloved grandparents, who hail from a background steeped in cinema. “It is incredible the life they have had, it fills me with pride and admiration. For me they are undoubtedly a mirror in which to look at myself every day, but not only for their past, but for how they carry that past in the present,” he tells BDE.

Angolan-Portuguese Mónica de Miranda’s The Island is a project with a double life - as an installation piece as well as a film - and originally commissioned as part of an exhibition exploring “Afrodiasporic lives and colonial pasts” at the Autograph Gallery in London. “I have two versions of the film, one for the installation and a visual arts context and one for cinema viewing,” the artist/filmmaker tells BDE.

There can be few more poignant or nostalgic films screening at this year’s DocLisboa than Léo Liotard’s It’s Party Time. Shot on a Camcorder when he was a student, Liotard and his friends were young and sometimes pretentious. They drank too much. They talked about sex and relationships. They played music. They even danced around naked. “Adolescence is a very narcissistic time of life,” he tells BDE.

Berlin-based filmmaker Claudia Müller discusses her new documentary about the Austrian Nobel Prize-winning novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek who is admired and reviled in equal measure. I thought, ‘Oh my god, how can I do this when there are so many opinions about her?’ I thought it was best if she speaks for herself,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

In his new film screening in DocLisboa’s Portuguese competition, João Rosas looks at Lisbon from an unlikely new perspective - that of construction workers destroying old buildings to make way for luxury apartments. “When I was invited to do this film on the construction site, I saw it as a microcosm of what was happening to the city,” the director tells BDE.

Ukrainian director Yelizaveta Smith was already at work on her new feature documentary before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February. The project has been presented this week to industry delegates in Malmö at the Nordisk Panorama Forum. On the day she speaks to BDE, Smith has only just arrived in Sweden. And, yes, it was a difficult journey.

Scandinavians think they know Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), She is the beloved children’s author who created Pippi Longstocking. The Swede’s books have been translated all over the world. But The Window In Stockholm, the new project from German director Wilfried Hauke, promises to show Lindgren in an unfamiliar light. He explains more to BDE.

It’s the type of story you expect to find in a Frederick Forsyth novel but it happened for real. Hamid Noury, an Iranian official implicated in the slaughter of thousands of dissidents in the summer of 1988, was lured to the west, apprehended and put on trial for his crimes. Swedish-based Iranian filmmaker Nima Sarvestani discusses his feature doc project with BDE.