Geoffrey Macnab

The Commune examines both the legacy of Slovakian poet, philosopher and politician Marcel Strýko, and his country’s communist past, one characterised by collaboration, betrayal and guilt. Director Jakub Julény and co-writer Pavel Smejkal explain the troublesome history to BDE.

At the start of Behind The Headlines two investigative journalists at a leading German newspaper have a rendezvous with a source in a Moscow Hotel. Not any source, rather one of the world’s most celebrated and elusive whistle-blowers, Edward Snowden. With them to film the encounter was director, Daniel Sager, who uncovers more for BDE.

“You need to choose to be the bad guy. You could also choose to be the good guy,” Chanoch Ze'evi tells BDE of his latest doc about Wilm Hosenfeld, the German army officer who helped Polish pianist Władysław Szpilman (as featured in Polanski’s The Pianist), and how his story still divides the small German town where he lived and worked.

BAFTA-nominated Sasha Joelle Achilli, whose 2020 Italy’s Frontline: A Doctor’s Diary chronicled medical staff as they tried to cope with the first wave of coronavirus, has launched a new production company, Miss Guided Films, together with fellow directors, Poppy Edwards and Charly Wai Feldman.

She is Australia’s ‘Queen of Honky Tonk,’ a country singer with a voice as powerful as that of the great Loretta Lynn. And her private life is as turbulent as that of any country music star too, explains director Matthew Walker of his I’m Wanita, which documents the great woman’s long awaited arrival in Nashville, the home of country.

It’s not the typical package holiday but when the opportunity arose for Finnish tourists to travel to Benin in West Africa as volunteers for a new vaccine study to counter diarrhoea in the region, there was no shortage of takers. Finnish director Mia Halme went with them to document the results.

When Israeli director Michal Weits showed her father her new doc Blue Box (a world premiere in World Showcase and concerning her great-grandfather, an important figure in the creation of modern-day Israel), he had to sit alone in his car to gather his thoughts after seeing it, the director tells Business Doc Europe.

The British tourist had got his calculations wrong. His plan had been to dive into the hotel swimming pool from a high window. Instead, he landed headfirst on the concrete surrounding the pool. A hotel worker was left to clear up the blood. The director gets equally stuck in with BDE...

Speaking at the CPH:DOX 2021 Reset! Conference, Nicole Newnham and James LeBrecht, the filmmakers behind Netflix’s Oscar nominated documentary Crip Camp (exec produced by Barack and Michelle Obama) hailed this year’s Oscar ceremony as “an incredible breakthrough” in its approach to disability.

There is an old brothel in Seville close by one of the city’s busiest highways. Now, the building has been turned into a refugee centre. This is where the subjects of Juan Antonio Moreno Amador’s effervescent new documentary Welcome To Spain have come to build themselves new lives. The director explains more…