Geoffrey Macnab

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…

Like many other Georgian citizens, Salomé Jashi was startled to see images of a gigantic tree floating down the Black Sea. It was on its way to the home of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire former Prime Minister of Georgia, who wanted it for his garden. Director Jashi branches out with BDE.

Flemish filmmaker Annabel Verbeke talks to Business Doc Europe about her Four Seasons In A Day, selected for Hot Docs and part of the Borderline collection, one of six creative documentaries about unknown but fascinating borders in Europe.

It's a marriage made on two continents and a film put together across multiple time zones. A Marriage: Love In The Time Of The Internet (a world premiere in Hot Docs) is the new documentary by Czech director Kateřina Hager, made in collaboration with Emmy award winning Pakistani director Asad Faruqi. Hager bonds with BDE.