Geoffrey Macnab

Finnish/UK filmmaker John Webster talks to Business Doc Europe about his film that exposes how corporate jargon, fashionable management practice and ‘self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency’ threaten to drain all sense of satisfaction from the work process. “If people have burn-out, it is not because of weakness and personal flaws but because they’ve just been subjected to a toxic working environment,” he says.

This isn’t the first time that Danish filmmaker Mistrati has explored the dirty secrets of the chocolate industry. His previous films include The Dark Side Of Chocolate (2010) and Shady Chocolate (2012). “The price for a chocolate bar is unnaturally low. It doesn’t make any sense. A chocolate bar should cost around 4 or 5 quid, not 50p. It’s unrealistic…unless you don’t pay the farmer and the farmer’s employees,” the director tells BDE of his F:act Award Comp selection.

CPH:DOX returns to cinemas April 23 after two online editions, opening with Into The Ice, a timely reminder of the dangers of the West’s continuing dependence on fossil fuels. “Now it seems that we finally understand that energy politics is security politics and that therefore we have to act fast…and this film shows we need to act even faster than we thought to save the climate,” says the festival’s Niklas Engstrøm.

The annual documentary forum DocedgeKolkata, which describes itself as an “incubation-cum-pitching” event for Indian and Asian filmmakers, is on an extraordinary run of success. One of the projects that the annual Indian event (which will be held virtually this year in March-May 2022) helped along the way in 2017, Writing With Fire from directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, has been nominated for the Feature Doc Oscar.

After working out a way to secure loans that the banks couldn’t trace, the Catalonian political activist Enric Duran became a folk hero, nicknamed ‘Robin Bank.’ Why did he do this? To expose the greed and corruption of the banking system. As she explains to BDE ahead of her feature doc’s world premiere at Thessaloniki, director Anna Giralt Gris was determined to hunt down Duran, and immerse herself into his world of secrecy.

Films don’t always turn out the way you expect. When Slovenian director Haidy Kancler began work on a feature doc, then called Skiing in Scarves, the expectation was that its three young Afghan female characters would have enriching and uplifting experiences in the west as ski instructors. But as the director explains to BDE, the doc’s eventual title indicates better the protagonists’ actual experience.

It was an incident of playground bullying that took place in a New York school more than half a century ago. There isn’t any archive footage of it, the victim doesn’t want to talk and filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt was one of the fifth graders who joined in the tormenting of the boy at the elementary school in Brooklyn. The filmmaker explains his Oscar nominated short doc to BDE.

Peter Day’s new feature doc Off The Rails (sold by Journeyman Pictures and world premiering in Thessaloniki) shows what happens when the buzz of the thrill wears off. Especially as the film’s two protagonists, parkour-obsessed daredevil youngsters Rikke and Aiden, are facing mental health issues and a gnawing sense of grief over the death of a close friend. The director explains his film to Business Doc Europe.

Love, Deutschmarks and Death…it sounds like the title of one of those acerbic Fassbinder melodramas of the 1970s. In fact, this is the name of the new feature documentary from director Cem Kaya about the Turkish music scene in Germany and which, last month, won the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award. Kaya gets musical with Business Doc Europe.

Following on from the 2019 doc Pictures From Afghanistan, director Robbie Fraser follows intrepid photojournalist, and fellow Scot, David Pratt into another war zone, this time Iraq. Yes, Iraq is a country riven by ethnic, tribal and religious divisions, but Fraser talks equally passionately to BDE of the country’s immense beauty and the kindness and hospitality of its people.