Geoffrey Macnab

In his feature doc No Place for You in Our Town (screening in Visions du Réel Latitudes and presenting at Movies That Matter, following its world premiere at CPH:DOX), Bulgarian director Nikolay Stefanov returns to his home town of Pernik to look at the lives of some of football club FC Minyor’s most die-hard supporters, who are part of a once-prospering, now struggling, mining community.

When she speaks to Business Doc Europe, US filmmaker Sierra Pettengill is in Zagreb for this week’s screenings of her documentary Riotsville, USA at ZagrebDox. She has come to town straight from CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. The festival dates are racking up for the film (sold by Dogwoof) which premiered in Sundance but is also due to screen at Hot Docs, at the Seattle International FF and in New Directors New Films in New York.

Northern Irish director Kathryn Ferguson’s feature doc Nothing Compares has its subject, Sinéad O’Connor, as its narrator. ‘Powerful’ and ‘heartrending’ are among the terms that reviewers have used to describe the film, which premiered at Sundance and screened in Copenhagen last week. The director explains to BDE how and why she was drawn to the life and work of the mercurial and very brilliant Irish singer-songwriter.

British filmmaker Ben Rivers and French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson are yet to meet in person - but audiences at CPH:DOX last week enjoyed an unusual collaboration between the duo. Atkinson provided new voice-over and musical accompaniments for two of Rivers’ films, Urth (2016) and Look Then Below (2019). The soundtracks were performed ‘live.’ Rivers was too busy with other work to travel to Copenhagen but he made time to speak to Business Doc Europe.

When she was preparing her documentary Fire Of Love (an international premiere in DOX:AWARD and Visions du Réel opening film), Sara Dosa took inspiration from François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim, she tells BDE. Her film is also about a love triangle, the passion French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft felt for each other - and their romantic obsession with volcanoes themselves.

In Sportscast 2, a Swedish football match offers director Sara Sjölin the perfect vehicle to commentate on the demise of her break-up with her boyfriend. The two teams were arch and bitter rivals. This, therefore, seemed the perfect match through which she could explore her relationship with him, she tells Business Doc Europe.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a towering figure in contemporary music. A genius, but one with a headstrong and flawed personality. As well as telling the story of 2019 staging of his magnum opus Licht, Dutch director Oeke Hoegendijk also offers an intimate and revealing portrait of Stockhausen himself, from the point of view of his wives, former lovers, children and collaborators. She explains more to BDE.

In Emilie Beck’s debut feature doc, screening in Nordic:Dox, 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] found during the journey, I wanted to follow her emotions, her existential travel...[but] the further we went, the bigger the story got,” director Beck tells BDE.

TV dramas have long perpetuated the stereotype of Naples as a Mecca for gangsters. In her Dox:Award Competition film, director Victoria Fiore wanted to show another side of the city, and so follows the Neopolitan kids, especially the lovable but mischievous Entoni. “Entoni’s story just shone through,” the director tells BDE. “I fell in love with his energy. He had so much of it. We got along straight away.”

If future generations want to know how the world’s scientific community responded to coronavirus, one of their first starting points is likely to be US director David France’s How To Survive A Pandemic, sold by Dogwoof. The film, screening in CPH: Science, tells the story of how scientists across the world raced to develop vaccines against a virus which has been killing millions. France explains his doc to BDE.