Geoffrey Macnab

Didier, the central character in The Echo Of The Herd (La voix du troupeau) is like one of those sad-eyed clowns you see in old silent movies. Deaf since birth and still mourning the loss of his brother Claude, he looks for solace in his work on a cattle farm in Auvergne. Now well into middle-age, he still takes a child-like joy in tending the animals and building fences - but when the cattle suffer, so does he. The director pairing of Matthias Joulaud and Lucien Roux discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Amsterdam/Warsaw-based director Piotr Pawlus and Dutch-based producer/co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao discuss their new collaboration, selected for International Competition at Visions Du Réel, about the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion. “The camera was my eyes,” says Pawlus. “It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

The German filmmaker discusses his new documentary about Germany’s shocking colonialist legacy in Namibia, and how a certain type of latter-day German tourist still makes the local people feel very uncomfortable. As we see in the film, they may seem like genial westerners but they don’t even try to hide their prejudices. “People being racist is something that to me is no surprise at all,” Jonas Spriestersbach tells BDE.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras, who is VdR Industry Special Guest in 2026, tells BDE. Poitras is joined in interview by co-director Mark Obenhaus.

In his new documentary, set in Morocco, Belgian Jérôme le Maire investigates how a massive renewable energy complex will affect the life of a small Berber tribe. “It was from my own window that I first saw enormous machines raising clouds of dust on the horizon. My research revealed that the world’s largest renewable energy plant was to be built on this collective land - land that until then had belonged to no-one in particular, and yet to everyone,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

When Sabine Fayoux Cantillo took over as Visions du Réel Head of Industry last autumn, the former Associate Director of Program at Chicken & Egg Films in New York was, in a sense, simply coming home. “When this opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer to return to a festival which has meant a lot to me in my career as a documentary worker…and to raise my child in my childhood home,” she tells BDE.

The Netherlands-based Italian filmmaker discusses his new feature documentary, selected for Movies That Matter, about the ongoing febrile political situation in Armenia. “The moment I got interested in Shahen was when I realised the pressure this young guy was under,” recalls director Marco De Stefanis. “He was keeping up the fight while his father was in prison. I felt really sorry for a guy that age that doesn’t have the same youth I had.”

Dutch filmmaker Kasper Verkaik’s new film tells the story of US journalist Alec Shimkin who went missing in action in Vietnam just as he was threatening to lift the lid on the US Operation Speedy Express atrocity of 1968/69, which had an estimated body count of over 30,000, many thousands of them unarmed Vietnamese civilians. In researching Shimkin, Verkaik realised “there was so much more to find out about the Speedy Express story,” and that the journalist’s scoop “was way bigger” than even the journalist himself had known.

Movies That Matter, the Hague-based festival for works exploring human rights and social issues, opens March 20 with American Doctor by Poh Si Teng, which world-premiered at Sundance. MTM has its share of world premieres, but Artistic Director Margje de Koning is less worried about having films first than other festivals. “For Movies That Matter, it’s nice to have premieres but it’s not our main requirement. Our philosophy is very much about the impact of the film.”

When thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters were washed up on beaches in the North East of England, director Jeanie Finlay quickly realised she had stumbled on an extraordinary but very grim story about the wanton destruction of marine life and the knock-on effect on fishing communities. Her new documentary, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, investigates the event. What’s more, it will be released by Glimmerama, the recently announced distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the production company owned by Finlay, who explains more to BDE.