Geoffrey Macnab

I Am Belmaya, the new film by Sue Carpenter and Belmaya Nepali, was up for two BIFAs earlier this month, for Best Doc and The Raindance Discovery award. Belmaya isn’t just the co-director of the documentary, she is its main subject too. The film tells the inspirational story of how the young Nepalese woman transforms her life through filmmaking. Co-director Carpenter explains to BDE.

Chilean filmmakers Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff are used to living in small apartments in Santiago. However, after they shot their 2018 film Los Reyes (which premiered that year at IDFA) and adopted one of its main protagonists - a stray dog called Chola whom they found prowling round the local skate park - life changed radically for the pair. They explain their subsequent Forum pitch-winning project to BDE.

When filmmaker Julia Bobkova was first approached by the St Petersburg Documentary Film Studio about making a documentary on Russian theatre guru Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (1863-1938), she wasn’t sure how to approach the task. Her brief was to look at how Stanislavski influences modern stage and screening acting. She explains to BDE how she made the story “come alive to a modern audience.”

British artist and filmmaker Sarah Beddington talks to Business Doc Europe about her debut feature documentary Fadia’s Tree, which premiered last month at the London Palestine Film Festival and which chronicles the director’s search for an ancient mulberry tree on the confiscated land of a woman now confined to a Lebanese refugee camp.

Last week, Anna Shishova-Bogolubova’s new documentary The New Greatness won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, an important boost for a project predicted to surface on the festival circuit in early 2022. International sales are handled by Autlook. The filmmaker explains her project to Business Doc Europe.

Hitchhiking French director Yohan Guignard tells Business Doc Europe about his documentary in which he follows an Oklahoma lone operator cop so depressed about his work that he turned to Couchsurfing to force himself to meet other people, which was how Guignard came upon his subject in the first place.

In her self-shot film, selected for IDFA Best of Fests, Cléo Cohen, a granddaughter of Jewish Arabs form Tunisia and Algeria, is determined to discover her identity. She spoke to Business Doc Europe about the emotional and evocative journey that results, as well as colonization and the essential business (at least from her grandmothers’ perspective) of straightening her very curly hair…

Newly available on discovery+, and coming hot on the heels of its Best of Fests screening at IDFA, is Scott Gawlik’s feature doc Set!, about the competitive world of table setting, in which the perfectionism of the participants is no different from that of an artist or even a filmmaker like Gawlik himself, he tells Business Doc Europe.

Veteran Danish filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen was in Amsterdam last week for the international premiere in Masters section of his deeply personal film The Banality Of Grief, in which he reflects on the recent death of his beloved wife, Madeleine.

In 1969, Harlem hosted the so-called ‘Black Woodstock’, a series of weekend events during which an astonishing array of talent, from Stevie Wonder to Gladys Knight to Nina Simone to Sly and the Family Stone wowed hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Footage of the event remained in a vault until it was liberated and transformed into the Searchlight/Hulu feature doc by Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, who gets down with BDE.