Geoffrey Macnab

Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont discovered the orphanage that features in his Sundance World Cinema Comp film A House Made of Splinters when in Ukraine making his The Distant Barking Of Dogs (2017). “They’ve been through a lot of tragedy in their lives but still they have this beautiful and super precious hope that things will be better in the future,” Wilmont tells BDE of his young subjects.

Megan Mylan has one Oscar to her name already, for her 2008 film Smile Pinki, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary short. Now, she is in the running again for her feature documentary Simple As Water, The film, shot between 2016 and 2018, examines the lives of various Syrian families, most of them refugees, in the wake of the civil war which devastated their homeland.

Jimmy Goldblum’s Oscar shortlisted 20-minute doc A Broken House, about US-based Syrian architect Mohamad Hafez, has a very unlikely patron and executive producer - leading US Democratic politician and former House Majority Leader, Dick Gephardt. The director explains the project and its development to Business Doc Europe.

As 2022 rolls in, French docs sales outfit Reservoir Docs has been beefing up its slate, with its acquisition of Marie-José vous attend à 16h, directed by Camille Ponsin and produced by Minima Productions. The film will receive its world premiere later this month at FIPADOC in the festival’s French Documentary Competition.

In his new doc, UK co-director Gabriel Clarke tackles the legendary Arsenal boss Arsѐne Wenger, talking to the man himself as well as Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Sir Alex Ferguson and others. “He just couldn’t find the right time to leave. He couldn’t work out his exit strategy…he was too in love with Arsenal,” Clarke explains to BDE of Wenger’s 22-year term at the North London club.

He was called the Pied Piper of American modern dance. His ballet troupe, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, achieved international renown. However, as Jamila Wignot’s new feature documentary Ailey reveals, Alvin (1931-1989) was a troubled and private figure. She explains more to BDE ahead of her film’s January 7 UK release.

When Posy Dixon attended the British Independent Film Awards earlier this month, the British-American director’s debut feature Keyboard Fantasies, nominated for Best Documentary, was actually already two years old. It is, though, entirely in keeping with the film’s subject matter that it has taken so long to reach audiences. The director explains why to BDE.

“What I found out is what a great, incredible, lovable, joyful guy this man is,” director Tom Donahue tells Business Doc Europe about the Rat Pack crooner and actor, and subject of his new doc. “I had never worked on a documentary where someone was that universally loved.” Sold by Autlook, the film features contributions from RZA, John Hamm and Angie Dickinson.

The title of the latest feature documentary from Sean Fine and Andrea Nix comes from the fist-pumping, team-bonding, high-fiving pre-match battle cry of the US women’s national football team…Let’s Fucking Go! As the directors tell BDE, it is a cry the footballers make as fervently in their fight for equal pay.

“I got into all of this because my uncle went through conversion therapy when he came out as trans as a child,” Kristine Stolakis explains to BDE of what led her to make her feature documentary (acquired by Netflix just before its premiere at the Tribeca Festival earlier this summer) about the so-called “pray gay away movement” through which LGBTQ people were encouraged by the church to use conversion therapy to change their sexual orientation.