Geoffrey Macnab

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.”

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.