Geoffrey Macnab

Business Doc Europe talks to feature doc debutante Marie Eve Hildbrand whose Healers, both a family affair and a wide-ranging meditation on different approaches to (and philosophies about) healthcare, launches the 52nd edition of Visions du Réel.

In a few days, nominee Maite Alberdi will be setting off from Chile to Los Angeles for this year’s Academy Awards, to be held on April 25. She will have a very special companion, the film’s star (and eponymous mole) 83-year-old Sergio Chamy, who will be boarding a plane for the first time in his life. The director talks to BDE.

It’s one of the most unlikely hit documentaries of the year – about a group of bus drivers from Dorset who put on a stage adaptation of the classic sci-fi horror film Alien (famous for its scene of a succubus exploding out of John Hurt’s chest). Intrepid filmmakers Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey space out with BDE following their SXSW success.

It remains to be seen whether My Octopus Teacher will get its tentacles on an Oscar on April 25, but the Netflix Original documentary, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, is already a phenomenon. Co-director Reed explains all to Business Doc Europe.

Austrian filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl made her doc The Bubble, about a vast Florida retirement complex, just as her parents were eyeing up their own retirement. The director tells BDE about octogenarian snogging, the political power that such an institution exerts as well as the new lease of life many of the residents feel they have been presented.

Czech director Pavel Borecký’s eco-documentary Living Water is on quite a run. It is showing in Visions du Réel in National Competition; in the CPH:SCIENCE section of CPH:DOX shortly afterward and then in Movies That Matter in the Netherlands in a screening arranged in co-operation with the Dutch Ministry Of Foreign Affairs.

Time addresses racism and the cruelty of the US penal system but it does so in a very personal and poetic fashion, told from the perspective of a resilient woman holding her family together as she campaigns for her husband’s release from prison. Director Garrett Bradley describes the evolution of the project to Business Doc Europe.

Director Anthony Giacchino and producer Alice Doyard discuss their poignant and heart-rending film about a 90-year-old former French Resistance fighter, who, together with a teenage companion, visits the Nazi concentration camp where her beloved brother died.

It is just over a year now since Ed Accura, producer of new documentary feature Blacks Can't Swim: The Sequel, co-founded the Black Swimming Association (BSA), set up to encourage black and ethnic minorities to swim. He gets in deep with Business Doc Europe.

He may have acted in Game Of Thrones and Bohemian Rhapsody, but over the past decade Brit Tim Plester has had a thriving career as a docmaker, starting with a film about Morris dancing selected for SXSW, and now Southern Journey (Revisited), which recreates ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s famous 1959 road trip through the Deep South.