Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.