Tara Karajica

Lithuanian Viktorija Mickute participated in the Ex Oriente training program in 2023/24, receiving the Cut thru the Noise Award, dedicated to the project team that made the most progress during the workshop at this year’s edition of East Doc Platform. In the film, Mickute follows several Lithuanian women from different generation who were all devotedfans of Latin American telenovelas in the 1990s.

“I made the decision to start working on this film half an hour after I learnt that my father had died,” Polish filmmaker Aneta Ptak tells Business Doc Europe of the genesis of her debut documentary feature Birdie, developed at Ex Oriente. “No other experience can compare to the experience of losing a very important person in your life. It’s like there’s something really terrifying and at the same time sacred about it.”

US journalist-turned-Academy Award-winning filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris visited the Czech capital last week in two capacities: as a juror in the International Human Rights Film Festival and as a guest tutor at Ex Oriente and the East Doc Platform. “Film is now global and the American audience is part of that global audience and people want to be able to reach it,” he told Business Doc Europe.

East Doc Platform, the largest co-production funding and distribution platform for Central and Eastern European documentaries, was once again placed centre stage as 59 projects from the region were last week presented to a wide variety of movers and shakers from the global documentary industry. Programme Director Zdeněk Blaha spoke to BDE about the importance of his event to the international documentary scene.

“When the full-scale invasion [of Ukraine] happened, I realized I needed to create something bigger to remind people about this war not through ruins and suffering, but through life,” Ukrainian-journalist-turned documentarian Mariia Shevchenko tells Business Doc Europe of the genesis of her debut doc feature Keepers of the Ruins. “It’s not [just] about destruction.” The project won the Ex Oriente Fine Cut Award, valued at €1,500.

In her directorial debut Walls, award-winning Polish actress Kasia Smutniak enters the red zone, a highly dangerous strip of forest along the Poland/Belarus border and which contains a group of desperate migrants trapped in political limbo. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not a reporter. I’m just a regular citizen that is trying to understand what is going on,” Smutniak tells Business Doc Europe of her motivation to make the film.

Sámi filmmaker Suvi West muses over why she decided to make her latest film Homecoming (Máhccan), a personal story about the return of Sámi artefacts long held in museums, to their homeland. There film is co-directed with Anssi Kömi. “I have been dealing a lot with representation,” she tells BDE. “So, I think this was one of the reasons why it felt so important to cover this story.”

If Thomas Imbach’s parents are to be believed, he was conceived during a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s cult film Breathless (À bout de souffle) some time at the beginning of the ‘60s. This would be the beginning of a lifelong connection to the “God of Cinema” as Imbach likes to call his filmmaking hero. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.