Geoffrey Macnab

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.

Welcome to the puppet show. Using life-like dolls, Tomasz Wolski’s new feature documentary, world-premiering in Nyon, remembers seismic events in Communist-controlled Poland in December 1970. The director looks back a half century with Business Doc Europe.

Mexican-American director Natalia Almada’s documentary Users is a poetic meditation both on motherhood and on the way that technology is disrupting humans’ relationship with the natural world. The director gets lyrical with Business Doc Europe.

In her new film Zinder (screening in competition in Visions du Reel and in Change Makers at CPH Dox) Aicha Macky looks at gang culture in Niger from the inside. She explains her film to Business Doc Europe.