Geoffrey Macnab

Business Doc Europe talks to Mandy Chang, who this month was appointed first CEO of the UK advocacy body, Documentary Film Council. “I think if you are privileged enough to work in this industry, you have to give something back - and I feel we are at a critical time in documentary where some of that space that documentaries once took up in the broadcasting schedules has been eroded away by formats and by other kinds of filmmaking,” Chang tells BDE.

Sabine Lidl’s film about the Norwegian/American author was never going to be a simple retelling of Hustvedt's life story. It would also be about her obsessions and inspirations - figures like Dadaist artist Baroness Elsa and French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. It was also going to be about biology, neurology and psychiatry, her migraines and hyper-sensitivity, and her attritional relationship with her father. “My editor Maxine Goedicke saved me…I had much more to tell, and this was already 110 minutes,” the director tells BDE of the struggle to shoehorn so much material into a feature under two hours. The film screens in the festival's Highlights section.

Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall’s film follows the charismatic (if slightly neurotic) US climate activist and stand-up comedian, Michael Greenberg, founder of Climate Defiance, a group which stages imaginative and very noisy protests at public events involving companies and individuals with links to fossil fuels. ‘Our goal is to help people, young people especially, feeling climate anxiety,” Wall tells Business Doc Europe. “For us, it was always about helping them feel a sense of agency and possibility so they can take a role, whatever it is.”

After he read an article about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and its potential benefits, Swiss director Marcel Wyss decided to become his own guinea pig. “It said that psychedelics can help people deal with deep fears, including the fear of death,” Wyss confides to Business Doc Europe. “After more than twenty years of making documentaries, many people had trusted me with their personal stories. At some point I felt it was my turn to open up and share my own.”

In a society in which expectant young mothers now need to bring their own medicine and equipment to hospital, Caroline, the subject of Nolwenn Hervé’s feature debut The Cord, is part of a network that gives Venezuelan women a chance of a safe pregnancy. “I didn’t have a producer; I didn’t have resources to do it; I didn’t have money but I was sure I would make it,” director Hervé describes both the film’s humble beginnings and her determination to tell Caroline’s story.

As ever, CPH:DOX Industry Head Mara Gourd-Mercado will be overseeing a packed professional programme that includes FORUM, the INTER:ACTIVE Exhibition and CPH:CONFERENCE, and which welcomes the cream of international creative and business talent. What the festival has no say over, however, is the current turmoil across the globe, which means that arranging travel plans for international guests has been somewhat testing. “It is such a fast-moving situation. We don’t know what it is going to look like from one day to another,” Gourd-Mercado tells BDE.

Pieter-Jan De Pue’s dramatic new documentary Mariinka (sold by Films Boutique and opening CPH:DOX) is the culmination of a full decade of work and has evolved greatly over that period, with one of the featured Zolotko brothers fighting for Russia while another fights for Ukraine. What’s more, the Ukrainian city of Mariinka has been turned into “a land full of rubble…there is nothing that stands there,” De Pue laments to Business Doc Europe.

Witch Club Satan are a fast-emerging mega-force in the world of Norwegian “black metal” - and when they play, they make a very big din. In her new film Hex (sold by CAT&Docs), cinematographer-turned-director Maja Holand follows the band’s founders, Victoria, Nikoline, and Johann, as they try to gate crash a male-dominated world. “My approach was that I stayed with them, often slept in the same house - and they sometimes just called me the fourth witch!” the director tells BDE of the rapport she shared with the band.

Before she retired, Lisbeth Grägg confided to director Sylvelin Måkestad that when she retired, she planned to travel to Finland and retrieve a long-lost revolver with which her father, fighting for the Finnish army, unsuccessfully attempted suicide after a clash with the Russians during the Second World War. “That was inspiring to me, an elderly woman setting off on a secret mission like this. I thought this is something I can’t miss. I have to apply for money and do a film about it,” Måkestad tells BDE.

After her assault by Spanish police officers on the day of the unofficial referendum on Catalonian independence, activist Marta Torrecillas was subjected to a horrific barrage of insults on social media where she was accused of lying about her injuries. “I saw her video. I was very touched by her story because although it was her, it could have been me or any of the other women who had been in polling stations on that day, trying to vote,” director Anna M. Bofarull tells BDE before the world premiere of her new feature doc Rebel.