Helen Fripp

In Tehran, Auto-Immune, director Afsaneh Salari goes under the skin of Iranian society via an intimate observation of beauty clinics in a city that records the highest rates of cosmetic surgery. “That's pretty surprising, because Iran is a country where you’re not allowed to show your body, you're not allowed to show your hair, you're not allowed to show your curves,” Salari told the Biarritz audience.

Jane Ray, Artistic Director of UK funding body The Whickers, outlined the stark realities of documentary filmmaking in her ‘Can We Afford to Do This Anymore?’ keynote at Fipadoc, January 28. “If it was just about finance, then independent international documentary would be dead by now. I think really it all comes back to the resilience of people to carry on regardless,” she told attendees in Biarritz.

Viktória is a young emerging filmmaker trying to navigate through a landscape of uncertainty. Like most of her peers, she is concerned about what her future will bring. Can humanity slow down climate change? Should she bring another life into such an uncertain world? To find answers she looks to the past, specifically to an 1872 expedition during which intrepid mariners sailed into the unknown, only to be frozen into the Arctic ice sheets for more than two years…

Haunted by memories of misogynistic oppression faced during the Syrian civil war, filmmaker Zaina Erhaim reconnects with four brave women she filmed during the height of the conflict. “I wasn't planning to do a film. I was trying to document what the women were going through because I was expecting to die and I wanted something to stay, to tell the story afterwards,” Erhaim told the FIPADOC during her January 24 pitch.

Spanish producer Katia Pinzon of Barnabe Productions and Iranian co-producer Elaheh Nobakht of Eli Image presented the Spanish/Iranian/French co-production, Singing Wings, at FIPADOC’s Wider Scope pitch session January 24. The project, which is directed by Iranian Hemen Khaledi, follows the destinies of a wounded stork and an elderly Kurdish woman.

“There is something fascinating, overwhelming, and almost mystical about standing in front of a glacier. It’s the closest thing to when we directors believed in God as children,” Spanish director Rafa Molés Vilar enthused to the FIPADOC professional audience of his project La Pietà, co-directed with Pepe Andreu Ibarra, which follows the Icelandic Björn siblings who lived at the foot of the largest glacier in Europe.

Designed to create a challenging and creative framework for new European talent working on their first or second documentary films, five new projects were pitched January 23 to the professional audience of FIPADOC International Documentary Festival, Biarritz. FIPADOC Pro runs to January 25.