Nick Cunningham

Netflix announced January 16 the return of the Documentary Talent Fund, to support emerging filmmakers. This year sees the programme extend to include the Republic of Ireland as well as the UK. “Building on the success of year one, the fund will continue to inspire and discover a new generation of documentary storytellers,” says Netflix. The theme for the next round of fully funded short docs is Connection.

Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September), sat down with Daniel Roher and Bulgarian Christo Grozev, director of and key protagonist within the highly acclaimed documentary Navalny, about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the subsequent (and shocking) investigation into the crime.

Oscar nominated Brazilian docmaker Petra Costa got to grips with Alex Pritz, director of The Territory, and the rain forest activist and Indigenous leader Bitaté Uru Eu Wau Wau. In the Academy Award short-listed feature doc, when a network of Brazilian farmers seizes a protected area of the Amazon rainforest, Bitaté and his mentor must fight back in defense of the land as well as other Indigenous peoples living deep within the forest.

Docmaker Leo Chiang sat down with Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to discuss the pair’s Oscar shortlisted Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, an exploration of the life of the singer-songwriter as presented through the prism of his much covered and much renowned modern-day hymn. The film was a long time in gestation, maybe even as far back as 2009 when the pair saw Cohen in concert for the first time, suggests Goldfine…

Oscar-nominated Danish documentary maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee) spoke to Sara Dosa about her hotly tipped feature doc Fire of Love which tells the story of the doomed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. “It was their character, their personalities, their philosophies which were so embodied in their life story,” she explains of the fascination she developed for her intrepid subjects.

Oscar winner James Marsh (Man On Wire, 2008) talks to Matthew Heineman about the powerful new doc Retrograde which captures the final 9 months of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan from multiple perspectives: one of the last U.S. Special Forces units deployed there, a young Afghan general and his corps defending their homeland from the Taliban, and the civilians desperately attempting to flee as the country collapses.

IDFA chief Orwa Nyrabia discusses the Oscar shortlisted Descendant with director Margaret Brown. The films tells the story of the descendants of the last known enslaved Africans who were brought to the United States aboard the ship Clotilda. “How can there be people in my family that I love but who are also racist?” asks Brown, who grew up in Mobile, Alabama. “That's a paradox to me…How do I reckon with that? How do I make art about that?”

The online DocCelerator programme, which organizes workshops to help filmmakers sharpen the focus of their documentaries, has restructured for its Spring 2023 edition. The programme will now run two strands - DocCeleratorStory and DocCeleratorWorkInProgress - to provide structured story input to docmakers at all stages of development and production.

Four new German docs will be presented in the Berlinale section dedicated to screening the best of local output and which is this year characterised by “conflicts and collisions.” Section opener Seven Winters in Tehran, about a dreadful travesty of justice, and Lonely Oaks, about the death of a protester, reveal a “concern for the future [that] comes naturally to up-and-coming German filmmakers,” the festival writes.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia talks to Indian director Shaunak Sen about the Sundance-winning All That Breathes, one of the front-runners in the race for this year’s Feature Doc Oscar. The film follows two brothers in a polluted Delhi who dedicate their lives to protecting the abundant but magnificent black kites that circle the skies above the city. “I would say it began with a vague interest in a kind of abstract triangulation of air, birds, humans,” Sen tells Kapadia.