Awards FYC 2024

Submitted for both Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film categories of the upcoming Academy Awards, the Swedish feature doc The Last Journey comprises an emotional, at times hilarious, roller-coaster ride as Filip Hammar takes his aging, despondent father back to the coastal town in the south of France where very year the family spent their summer holidays. Hammar and co-director Fredrik Wikingsson talk to BDE about Sweden’s highest-grossing documentary ever.

The Ugandan filmmakers discuss their acclaimed doc together with Bobi Wine himself and Kenyan director Judy Kibinge. Running in the country’s 2021 presidential elections, Wine uses his music to denounce the dictatorial regime and support his life’s mission to defend the oppressed and the voiceless people of Uganda. In this fight, he must also take on the country’s police and military.

In his new film The Pigeon Tunnel (in cinemas and on Apple TV globally from October 20th), renowned documentary maker Errol Morris explores the life and work of writer John Le Carré, author of such classic espionage novels as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. “[I] could have gone on forever with this guy,” the Oscar-winning Morris tells Business Doc Europe.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.

Lea Glob’s portrait of artist Apolonia Sokol, shot over 13 years, is a chronicle not only of friendship, pain and (ultimately) success, but very much a record of recent seismic political, societal and cultural change. “When I say at the beginning of the film that she's walking in the footsteps of the great painters, she is very literally now painting in Picasso's old studio in Paris,” Glob tells BDE of Apolonia’s emergence as a renowned artist. “Now she opens the windows to tourists and says, ‘Picasso's not here, but I am.’”

Daughters follows four girls whose fathers are in jail in Washington DC. Co-director Patton is the organiser of a father-daughter dance programme that allows these girls and their dads to meet - and dance - behind bars. “With my work with girls in the community, unfortunately I often see a disconnect between Black girls and their fathers. I’ve also seen some who have great relationships…what I have realised is that those girls who do have a relationship with their father that is positive usually have a really great outcome as they are growing into womanhood,” Patton tells BDE.

It’s a magical place, a warehouse in LA which many have likened to Gepetto’s workshop in Pinocchio. Broken musical instruments are brought here in their dozens and craftspeople put them back together again. In their latest film together, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers go inside the workshop which ensures that school kids without money can continue to play their violins, trumpets and pianos. The filmmakers talk to BDE.

Laura McGann’s feature documentary tells the story of a love which seemed predestined, between two people who were driven by their dedication to the perilous sport of freediving: Alessia Zecchini, an Italian world champion diver, and Irish Stephen Keenan, an adventurer who devoted his life to making sure divers came back up alive. The director discusses her film, which deals, in equal measure, with endurance, danger and death.

George Michaels is one of the unsung heroes of US political life, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who, in 1970, changed his mind and supported a bill extending abortion rights, in the process bringing his political career to an end. His story is told in the Oscar shortlisted short film Deciding Vote. “We’re not used in this era to people who change their minds. It’s not something that politicians do,” says co-director Jeremy Workman.

In her documentary which recently won the top prize at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival, Asmae El Moudir rebuilds the Morocco of her childhood using hand crafted models as she tries to unravel long concealed family secrets. Along the way she discovers small lies that lead to disturbing revelations about the entire society. “There is a lot of pain here but there is a lot of laughing also in the film. We can laugh, we can cry, we can have every emotion in this film. For me, cinema is emotion,” she tells BDE.