Geoffrey Macnab

Veteran London-based producer David P Kelly has credits ranging from Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer to Vera Glagoleva’s Two Women, which starred Ralph Fiennes. Now, he has returned to documentary with his new feature doc, The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas, sold by Visit Films and which world-premieres in Cannes Classics this weekend.

“I think that Cannes is a perfect setting for this film – isn’t it the purpose of the festival to give a platform for cinema which challenges artistic and intellectual stereotypes? To give a voice to the directors, who are searching for the new ways of expression,” director Sergei Loznitsa suggests to BDE ahead of the world-premiere of his shocking new documentary.

“Schindler got everything, but women also deserve to get at least something, some recognition,” Russian producer/sales agent Raisa Fomina says of her new documentary 'Bitter Taste Of Love or Frau Schindler’s List' - and of a perceived injustice it is seeking to right. Fomina explains more to Business Doc Europe.

It’s a blazing hot Cannes afternoon. Mark Cousins is on an apartment terrace in a building off the Croisette, wearing his kilt. It’s a few hours after the premiere of his latest documentary, The Story of Film: A New Generation, screening in the Cannes Classics section (and sold by Dogwoof), and he’s all set to talk with Business Doc Europe.

Spanish director Miguel Eek’s feature doc The First Woman (screening this week at Docaviv) was a project which took extreme resilience and sensitivity to complete. Its protagonist Eva is a schizophrenic who has been in a psychiatric hospital in Mallorca for several years and about to leave and move into an assisted living residence. The director talks to BDE.

Cannes will mark the first event in over a year at which Salma Abdalla, CEO of doc sales outfit Autlook, will come face to face with theatrical distributors, with titles that include Loving Highsmith, just acquired, and the sports doc Running For The Revolution, about legendary Cuban runner Alberto Juantorena. Abdalla gets on her marks with Business Doc Europe.

Philippa Kowarsky’s sales outfit Cinephil will hit the Cannes market this week with several new docs on its slate, among them the multi-director A Jewish Life, described as a companion piece to the company’s award-winning A German Life (2016), and Adi Arbel’s Grossman, a TV doc about the revered Israeli writer David Grossman.

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.