Geoffrey Macnab

Matt Sarnecki’s captivating documentary is more than the story of a murder, that of Slovakian investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. It’s also a “blueprint of how corruption works…[how] organised crime has worked hand in hand with law enforcement and other political leaders to corrupt a country,” Sarnecki tells BDE.

In Emilie Beck’s debut feature doc, selected for AJB Doc, a young woman, Priyangika, who was adopted at a young age, embarks on an existential odyssey to her birth country of Sri Lanka to discover her own story. “I knew that whatever she [Priyangika] finds during the journey, I wanted to follow her emotions, her existential travel..[but] the further we went, the bigger the story got,” director Beck told BDE before the film’s world premiere at CPH:DOX.

Oddly, the legendary Jean-Luc Godard has been the subject of relatively few documentaries. But like buses, two have come along in 2022. Earlier this year we saw Mitra Farahani’s playful See You Friday Robinson, centered around a conversation between Godard and Ebrahim Golestan. Now, Cyril Leuthy's Godard Seul Le Cinéma is selected for Venice Classics. Director Leuthy talks to BDE.

The old cliché has it that two things in life you can’t avoid are death and taxes. In Israel, you can add military service to the list. Oscar-nominated Guy Davidi’s new feature documentary Innocence, sold by Autlook and which has been screening in competition in Orizzonti, looks at the human toll this policy takes. He explains more to BDE.

Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin were in fiery form when talking to the international press in Venice on September 3 before the world-premiere of All The Beauty And The Bloodshed. The film, handled by Altitude Film Sales, looks at the part that artist Nan Goldin played in “taking down” the billionaire Sackler family who made their fortune through pharmaceuticals.

UK filmmaker Adrian Sibley profiles the late and (very) great Irish actor in 'The Ghost of Richard Harris', screening in Venice Classics. The director first met up with Harris the year before he died in 2002. “Everybody says that their film is long in gestation, and that it has taken forever. With this one, it really did,” Sibley tells Business Doc Europe.

Sergei Loznitsa discusses his new archive-based documentary about the trial, in 1946, of fifteen Nazis and their collaborators, accused of war crimes committed during WW2 in Ukraine. “On the one hand, of course, they are all criminals. The crimes they committed are absolutely terrible and inhumane. On the other hand, they are human beings. It is terrible to think they made such terrible choices in their lives that drew them to this complete degradation and destruction.”

Screening Out of Competition in Venice, Steve James’ new documentary tells the remarkable story of the US spy Ted Hall who, in the 1940s, passed over secrets about the atomic bomb. “He did it for the right reasons. He didn’t do it because he wanted the Soviet Union to dominate the world. He did it because he was worried about what the US was capable of,” James tells Business Doc Europe.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature, premiering in Venice Classics. She talks to BDE.

Spielberg, Eastwood, Scorsese, De Niro, Tarantino…these modern-day titans of cinema all gave extensive interviews to Francesco Zippel for his new feature documentary, Sergio Leone – L’italiano che inventò l’America, screening in Venice Classics, produced by Sky Studios and Sky Italia and due to be released in Italian cinemas by 01. Director Zippel gives a fistful of comment about his new doc.