Geoffrey Macnab

Filmmaker Frederique De Montblanc talks to Business Doc Europe about her study of high-powered women in industry, the dilemmas they face and the hurdles De Montblanc herself had to overcome to make her film. “It was hard to tell [the banks] that I wanted to do a series of intimate portraits of women. They don’t get that. In some cases, I had to cancel shootings because in some cases the banks weren’t helping at all. Actually, they were working against us.”

Screening in Dutch Movies Matter Competition, Dutch filmmaker Marieke van der Winden’s Keep Silent (Het Grote Verzwijgen) comprises a deep dive into a family history that reveals the extent of Nazi collaboration and the continuing taboo the family members must deal with. “What really was helping me during the process, and was also a motivation to make the film, was getting to know my mother better,” the director tells BDE.

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 in MTM Camera Justitia Competition, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.

Pulitzer Prize nominated US novelist Marianne Wiggins is the subject of the new doc world-premiering this week in the International Medium/Short competition in Nyon. This, though, isn’t the typical biographical portrait of an important writer. It’s more of a story about creativity in the face of illness; an intimate study of an artist trying to recover her full faculties after a devastating personal setback. Co-director Ressler talks to BDE.

Canadian filmmaker Jason Loftus talks to Business Doc Europe about his mixed media Eternal Spring, the thrilling and emotional story of a group of Falun Gong practitioners who managed briefly to take over Chinese state TV. The film is selected for Grand Jury Doc Competition.

Director Daniel Kemény tells Business Doc Europe about his Swiss Competition film Supertempo, shot in Rome in the early days of the pandemic, and featuring himself and his girlfriend. “We were three in there, Laura, me and the camera. The camera was always with us,” Kemény remembers of the tripartite relationship during lockdown.

Director Beckermann advertised a casting call for a film based on a notorious Viennese pornographic novel from 1906. Her subsequent doc sees 75 men confronted with excerpts from the book. “I made the film also as a kind of test. How will people - the public and society - react to it? Where do we stand today? Is it possible today to show such a film, or will there be wokeness against it?” she asks BDE.

If you haven’t heard of Czech composer Jan Kapr, that’s not a surprise. Kapr (1914-1988) was once one of the most prominent musical figures in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia but he fell spectacularly from grace after speaking out against the Russians in the wake of the 1968 Prague Spring. Czech filmmaker Lucie Králová explains her Burning Lights Competition documentary to BDE.

Elizabeth: A Portrait In Parts, a Special Screening at Visions Du Réel, may seem an uncharacteristic project for the late Roger Michell, director of the romcom Notting Hill. It’s an entirely archive-based documentary looking at the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II. However, as its producer Kevin Loader points out to BDE, it has many of the same qualities as his feature films.

When director Peter Entell’s father was 75, he sent his son a letter suggesting he should make a film about old people. “It’s fun to be old,” was one possible title his father suggested. Entell took his father at his word. The documentary he made, premiering in the Burning Lights competition at Visions Du Reel, doesn’t portray old age in quite the way the father first anticipated. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.