Geoffrey Macnab

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.

“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.