Geoffrey Macnab

“I guess I have had a kind of meandering life. I haven’t really been able to follow the ABCD route through things,” Scottish filmmaker Lizzie MacKenzie tries to make sense to BDE of the somewhat random circumstances which eventually led to her making her feature documentary The Hermit of Treig, a world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival 2022.

Filmmakers Jon Shenk and Pedro Kos talk to Business Doc Europe about their Netflix-backed short documentary Lead Me Home which deals with homelessness, and which has been nominated for an Oscar. “It’s difficult to change people’s minds until you touch people in the heart…we just wanted to remind people there is this incredible breadth of humanity out there that is suffering.”

Matt Ogens’ Oscar-nominated short film Audible is a coming-of-age story following teenage American football star, Amaree McKenstry-Hall, at the Maryland School for the Deaf. From the start, Ogens knew that he wanted to follow a senior from high school, about to “go out into the hearing world. It’s a really pivotal moment, going outside the bubble of your safe school,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Rory Kennedy’s new film, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, just released on Netflix, looks behind the two crashes of Boeing 737s. The first, in October 2018, was a Lion Air flight in Indonesia. All 189 people on board died. The second, in March 2019, was an Ethiopian Airlines flight taking off from Addis Ababa. Again, all 157 aboard died. Filmmaker Rory Kennedy discusses her film with BDE.

Young German docmaker Sarah Noa Bozenhardt has been at Berlin this week as part of the “Face To Face With German Films” event highlighting 7 up-and-coming young German talents. It was also an opportunity for Bozenhardt to talk up her recent film Among Us Women, which premiered in DOK Leipzig International Competition 2022. And as she reveals to BDE, she also grew up in the circus.

“This project was a passion project for me,” German director Alice Agneskirchner tells BDE of her feature doc Come With Me To The Cinema (a world premiere last weekend as a Forum Special). The film tells the story of Erika and Ulrich Gregor, the ardent cinephiles who launched the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin and established the International Forum at the Berlin Film Festival.

The recent Oscar nomination for Austrian-based doc sales outfit Autlook for Writing With Fire (pictured) continues the company’s impressive awards run. It follows on from such other Autlook titles such as For Sama and Of Fathers And Sons which have been prominent in past awards campaigns. Company CEO Salma Abdalla talks docs, sales and award strategies to BDE.

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be OK won a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in Berlin earlier this week. It’s a bleak essayistic documentary which uses both archive material and clay figurines to tell a story of cruelty and destruction. The Oscar-nominated Cambodian filmmaker discusses his documentary with Business Doc Europe.

Producer Hubertus Siegert, CEO of spicefilm GmbH, explains to BDE how Simon Brückner’s provocative new documentary, about populist German right-wing party AfD (Alternative For Germany), was conceived, and why it is likely to have the effect of a foot being plunged into a hornet’s nest when it is released in Germany by Majestic in April.

Gazing…Unseeing, the short film by Mohamed Abdelkarim which world premiered in Berlin’s Forum Expanded section, has a similar feel to Chris Marker’s classic La Jetée (1962), not so much on its aesthetics, “but in the approach to narrative and in the melding of reality and fiction,” the director explains.