Geoffrey Macnab

Jonathan Demme, the director of The Silence Of The Lambs as well as a host of award-winning documentaries, died over four years ago, in April 2017. Nonetheless, the last film he was working on, Right To Return is still being finished, and is one of many represented in the Cannes market this week by Reservoir Docs’ Anais Clanet, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

It’s just over a month since Richard Ray Perez took over as executive director of International Documentary Association. An experienced docmaker himself, and former Director, Creative Partnerships of the Doc Film Programme at the Sundance Institute, Perez tells BDE of his desire to create more opportunities for more filmmakers, and the need for more documentary voices to be heard.

“Our mission is to use the power of storytelling to galvanise environmental justice and regeneration,” Jill Tidman, Executive-Director of the San Francisco-based Redford Center, tells BDE during Sunny Side, of the non-profit set up in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son James Redford, which has become a powerful force in the doc world.

Kārlis Lesiņš gets aboard with Business Doc Europe to explain his latest doc project Nord Express, about the Rail Baltica project, the new (and increasingly complex) high speed rail line that is supposed to link the Baltic states with central and northern Europe.

Latvian director Dāvis Sīmanis discusses his cinematic quest to understand immortality with Business Doc Europe. “Whenever you are making a film about immortality, it means you are making a film about death,” he maintains.

Producer-director Jacqueline Farmer will be overseeing the Sunny Side panel, Why We’re Still Talking About Women? (Tues June 22, 4.00 PM, CEST). As she explains to Business Doc Europe, it’s a question to which she herself has many answers.

After 10 years, pioneering film executive and equal rights campaigner Anna Serner will be stepping down from her position as CEO of the Swedish Film Institute later this autumn. On the eve of Sunny Side Of The Docs, which will include her contribution to the June 21 Diversity panel, Serner looks back at a decade in which there has been huge change within the global film industry.

As a film critic, Laurent Roth frequently watched and reviewed the films of Israeli director Amos Gitaï. As a festival programmer, he oversaw a retrospective of Gitaï’s work at Marseilles Doc Fest. Over the years, he came to know Gitaï personally and even to visit him in Israel. Now, he has made a film about the director, which he discusses with BDE.

When filmmakers Jeremy Ungar and Ivaylo Getov’s journeyed to Cuba to see the all-female a cappella group Vocal Vidas after a tip-off by their producer, they freely admit that they “lucked out.” The filmmakers’ rousing musical doc Soy Cubana had its international premiere this week at Sheffield. The pair tell all to BDE.

Director Clive Patterson and Emmy award-winning journalist Sorious Samura talk to Business Doc Europe about their (somewhat fraught) documentary Sing, Freetown, premiering today at Sheffield, which set out to tell another story of Sierra Leone, not one focussing on Ebola, cholera, violence, war and corruption.