Geoffrey Macnab

When he appeared on stage this weekend for the world premiere of Myanmar Diaries, the filmmaker was in a mask and dark glasses. Even in Germany, he was still wary about the long reach of the Myanmar junta who took over the country in last year’s brutal military coup. Interviewed by BDE in the Berlinale Palest, the filmmaker is showing his face but politely explains he can’t share his identity.

Oscar-nominated US director Daniel Raim was around 11 or 12-years-old, visiting his grandparents when he first watched Norman Jewison’s movie version of Fiddler On The Roof (1971), the subject of his new documentary Fiddler’s Journey To The Big Screen (screening in the EFM). Raim talks to BDE about the enduring legacy of Jewison’s masterpiece.

Italian director Nicolò Bassetti decided to make his documentary Into My Name, which world premiered in Berlinale Panorama, after speaking to his own son, he tells BDE. The film explores the lives of four young friends as they deal with gender transition. It was executive produced by Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated Canadian actor who came out as transgender in 2020.

Due to his advanced age and the difficulty of travelling in the pandemic era, renowned Israeli photographer Micha Bar-Am wasn’t able make it to Berlin (where he was born in 1930) for the premiere of Ran Tal’s new film about him. Nonetheless, director Tal tells BDE that Berlinale is the perfect setting for the film’s launch. Bar-Am’s family lived in Germany for many generations. He saw himself as a German boy. His son lives there today.

Raul Domingues’ new feature documentary was shot in the fields and forests surrounding the family farm in Portugal and its main character - that tough, gnarled-looking old woman still carrying out back-breaking work - is the director’s grandmother. There is nothing easy about the lifestyle Domingues depicts, but his love for the land is apparent in every frame of the doc.

Nelly & Nadine (a world premiere this month in Berlin) is one of several films that Swedish director Magnus Gertten has been inspired to make using remarkable newsreel footage shot in his home town of Malmö at the end of the Second World War. He explains more to Business Doc Europe.

“All hell broke loose,” one observer remarks with what turns out to be understatement early on in Attica, the Oscar-shortlisted Showtime documentary directed by Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry. The film tells the apocalyptic story of what happened following a prison riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State in September 1971. Prison staff were taken as hostages. Negotiations began. Then, tensions began to ratchet up.

Eight years after her triumph with Citizenfour (2014), American filmmaker Laura Poitras is back on the Oscar trail with her short, Terror Contagion, which is one of the films included in Neon’s portmanteau feature, The Year Of The Everlasting Storm. The filmmaker discusses her Oscar shortlisted doc with Business Doc Europe.

“The film is about a relationship, about two people in love and about a young man who wants what all of us want…stability, peace, happiness, love,” Elizabeth Mirzaei explains of her Oscar-shortlisted short doc about Shaista, happily married to Benazir, but who must make a life choice, the consequences of which we see in the second half of the film.

Harar-based documentary Faya Dayi explores the role that the addictive plant khat plays in Ethiopian society. “The meaning this plant had, which had existed for centuries, it was completely morphing in front of our eyes. It was being separated from its spiritual roots,” she explains to BDE. “[Consuming] it had become a pastime, completely devoid of those anchoring ideas, those anchoring emotions.”