Geoffrey Macnab

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.

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.”