Geoffrey Macnab

Award-winning Danish director Pernille Rose Grønkjær is promising that her new feature doc Solutions will “spike debate.” The film is based around a rendezvous in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at which leading scientists, philosophers and entrepreneurs came together to discuss no less than the survival of the planet. Grønkjær explains more to BDE.

Ask CEO Mario Adamson, who co-runs Swedish doc production company Sisyfos, just why the company has established its new Scottish outpost, and he explains it is not just because of the heather and the whisky. The producer points to “shared sensibilities” between the Scots and the Swedes. He shares even more with BDE.

As she approaches her final CPH:DOX (running April 21-May 12) before departing to become Director of the National Film School Denmark, Business Doc Europe finds the event’s founder and CEO Tine Fischer in resolute mood.

Filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Müller was a fan of Patricio Galvez, a musician and fellow Chilean living in Sweden. But as he tells BDE, the director never imagined that he would end up accompanying Galvez on a journey to Syria to rescue his seven grandchildren, nor that he would make a film about it.

“It was all triggered when an Albanian scholar told me that this subject had been done a thousand times and never correctly,” Slovenian director Marija Zidar recalls to Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which led to her making Reconciliation (a premiere at CPHDOX in Next Wave Award this month).

Lance Oppenheim originally embarked on his project Some Kind Of Heaven (due for UK release in May 2021 by Dogwoof) as part of an undergraduate thesis at Harvard. The film looks at the lives of characters living in The Villages, the Florida retirement home that also provides the backcloth for Valerie Blankenbyl’s doc The Bubble (VdR 2021).

It’s the island that time passed by. Once a thriving community in the Soviet era, it is now largely abandoned by the Russian government. And co-director Svetlana Rodina’s interested in it was piqued by a photograph, she tells Business Doc Europe.

On the face of it, the distinguished French novelist, biographer, filmmaker and screenwriter doesn’t seem an obvious fit as guest of honour at a doc festival like Nyon. However, as he points out to BDE, he has always been passionate about the documentary form.

Norwegian director Anders Hammer doesn’t yet know precisely how he will spend Oscar night or, indeed, whether he’ll be in black tie. However, he reassures readers that he won’t be wearing the hoodie that he is dressed in during his interview with BDE.

There are warmer, easier places to make documentaries than Siberia. This, though, is where intrepid Belgian independent director Liesbeth De Ceulaer headed to make her bold new doc/drama hybrid feature, Holgut (a joint world premiere both at Visions du Réel and at CPH: DOX). The director explains why to BDE.