Geoffrey Macnab

Like almost everyone else, American filmmaker Jeff Orlowski used to have an optimistic and enthusiastic view of social media, he tells Business Doc Europe, until his tech friends at Stanford University began to reveal its dark side…

UK audiences are likely to feel a familiar sinking feeling while watching Athlete A, the harrowing Netflix documentary about disgraced US Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. In late February 2021, seventeen former gymnasts in the UK brought legal action against British Gymnastics for the sustained physical and psychological abuse they endured.

Philippa Kowarsky’s Tel Aviv-based Cinephil announced this week it will handle world sales on Ted Braun’s new documentary ¡Viva Maestro!. The film has already been picked up by Greenwich Entertainment for its North American release.

Anyone wanting a reminder of how a certain Donald J Trump ended up living for four years in a home on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington could do worse than start with British filmmaker/journalist James Fletcher’s new documentary, The Accidental President. Fletcher talks to BDE.

Prolific Berlin-based producer/director Jens Meurer has given details of his latest documentary projects, one of which is as quintessentially English as one can imagine, about an end-of-the-pier variety show on the Norfolk coast.

In this extract from Geoffrey Macnab’s new book ‘The British Film Industry in 25 Careers’ Andy Whittaker explains how he set up his doc distribution company Dogwoof, in the process satisfying a demand for a UK public hitherto starved of quality documentary fare.

One of the companies returning to the second edition of EFM Archive Day is British Pathé. The company’s Simon Witter underlines to Business Doc Europe the increasing demand for archive from the international filmmaking community.

Award-winning Elizabeth Klinck talks EFM Archive Day 2021, working during the pandemic and a career banging the drum for the increasingly essential archive sector.

There surely won’t be any other films in this week’s Berlinale competition that have had as lengthy a gestation as Maria Speth’s epic documentary, Mr Bachmann And His Class (Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse), sold at the EFM by Films Boutique.

“Since they have worked so hard to pass these images on to us, we must look at them,” Christophe Cognet tells viewers in his new film À pas aveugles (From Where They Stood), premiering in Berlinale Forum (and sold at the EFM by MK2). Cognet is talking about photographs taken by inmates from inside Nazi death camps.