Geoffrey Macnab

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.

Following on from the acquisition this week of Renate Raman and Joren Slaets’ Yaren and the Sun by New York Times Op Docs, VAF documentary maestro Marie Van Innis fills in Business Doc Europe on the boom in Flemish docs. And there’s a lot more to come, she underlines…

“We are not a sector. We are a collective force!” is the slogan under which Chiledoc operates. The Chilean documentary community has shown considerable resilience during really tough times. Chiledoc’s Flor Rubina explains how to Business Doc Europe.

Business Doc Europe talks to Meera Devi, Chief Reporter at Khabar Lahariya and core protagonist within Writing With Fire. “Both personally and professionally, it has really amplified the newspaper and its work. We have witnessed a completely different kind of popularity - and that is really good,” Meera says of the multi award-winning doc.