Geoffrey Macnab

The logistics sound daunting: 40 cinematographers and more than 300 people filming in 64 locations combined to create the collective portrait of a single July night in Ukraine. In her epic new film, Olga Chernykh draws together imagery of everything from nightclubs to air raids, from soldiers on the frontline to women giving birth, from passengers aboard a train about to head east to wildlife coming out after dark. "It’s about resilience and strength, of course, and about love - love for each other and love for the country,” Chernykh tells BDE.

In her new film, French director Emma Boccanfuso follows the remarkable Mother Courage-like Sueli, a flamboyant local woman living in a Rio favela and fighting to hold her extended family together, while running her own makeshift bar and enjoying plenty of gossip with the neighbours. “I very quickly found myself propelled into the heart of the home and the intimacy of this family,” the director tells BDE. “From there, a deep friendship was born, to the point that I have been coming back several times a year to see them for the past ten years.”

When Dutch filmmaker Jona Honer first visited China, he soon worked out that the easiest way to connect with the young and extremely affluent sub-strata of Chinese society was through their favourite nightclubs. He was also fascinated by the rituals of capitalism, which resembled more a religion in terms of its structure and the social support it offered. “They [the club goers] create their own symbols, maybe without knowing it consciously,” Honer tells BDE. “Every religion has its own symbols. They create their own value system…it’s more than a night out.”

Didier, the central character in The Echo Of The Herd (La voix du troupeau) is like one of those sad-eyed clowns you see in old silent movies. Deaf since birth and still mourning the loss of his brother Claude, he looks for solace in his work on a cattle farm in Auvergne. Now well into middle-age, he still takes a child-like joy in tending the animals and building fences - but when the cattle suffer, so does he. The director pairing of Matthias Joulaud and Lucien Roux discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Amsterdam/Warsaw-based director Piotr Pawlus and Dutch-based producer/co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao discuss their new collaboration, selected for International Competition at Visions Du Réel, about the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion. “The camera was my eyes,” says Pawlus. “It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

The German filmmaker discusses his new documentary about Germany’s shocking colonialist legacy in Namibia, and how a certain type of latter-day German tourist still makes the local people feel very uncomfortable. As we see in the film, they may seem like genial westerners but they don’t even try to hide their prejudices. “People being racist is something that to me is no surprise at all,” Jonas Spriestersbach tells BDE.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras, who is VdR Industry Special Guest in 2026, tells BDE. Poitras is joined in interview by co-director Mark Obenhaus.

In his new documentary, set in Morocco, Belgian Jérôme le Maire investigates how a massive renewable energy complex will affect the life of a small Berber tribe. “It was from my own window that I first saw enormous machines raising clouds of dust on the horizon. My research revealed that the world’s largest renewable energy plant was to be built on this collective land - land that until then had belonged to no-one in particular, and yet to everyone,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

When Sabine Fayoux Cantillo took over as Visions du Réel Head of Industry last autumn, the former Associate Director of Program at Chicken & Egg Films in New York was, in a sense, simply coming home. “When this opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer to return to a festival which has meant a lot to me in my career as a documentary worker…and to raise my child in my childhood home,” she tells BDE.

The Netherlands-based Italian filmmaker discusses his new feature documentary, selected for Movies That Matter, about the ongoing febrile political situation in Armenia. “The moment I got interested in Shahen was when I realised the pressure this young guy was under,” recalls director Marco De Stefanis. “He was keeping up the fight while his father was in prison. I felt really sorry for a guy that age that doesn’t have the same youth I had.”