Awards FYC 2024

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.

At the heart of Elisa Gambino’s multi award-winning short documentary is the unbreakable bond between Jessa and her young teen brother Jary whom the rest of her family rejected from birth due to his facial disfigurement. Despite living in poverty with two children of her own, she sets out to arrange the corrective surgery that will transform his life. “It was a profound honour to direct this film and share Jessa’s masterclass in unconditional love,” says director Gambino.

In her directorial debut at the age of 84, legendary US doc producer Sheila Nevins turns to the shocking restrictions placed by US educators on reading material for kids. These includes works by James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood as well as graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about The Holocaust. The constituency Nevins turns to in her film is the kids themselves. “I know what the left thinks, I know what the right thinks, I don’t know what the kid thinks,” she sums up why children are placed fully in the frame.

In Pulitzer Prize-winning Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol, Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city struggle to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters who remain in the city, they capture what later become defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and much more. The director discusses his film with Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature doc, which is well positioned to advance during the upcoming Awards season. She talks to BDE.

“In making the film, I discovered he [Little Richard] was more than an icon. He had incredible substance that has never been really documented. His anarchic, rebellious spirit has left a musical and cultural impression on us to this day,” the director tells Business Doc Europe during a whistle stop trip to London in early December to introduce a special screening of her new film at the V&A Museum in South Kensington.

Released in the US by Kino Lorber and with ticket sales in Germany even exceeding those in its country of origin, Suzanne Raes’ Dutch feature documentary sets out to answer a fundamental question about Johannes Vermeer, arguably The Netherlands’ greatest artistic export. Among all the fakes, copies and false attributions, what makes a true Vermeer masterpiece? BDE puts director Raes in the frame.

Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams brings Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s New York Times bestseller to the screen with Stamped from the Beginning. Published in 2016, Dr. Kendi’s National Book Award winner chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. The director discusses his film with British producer/director Joanna Natasegara.

The prolific US director discusses his new documentary with Oscar-winning James Marsh (2008, Man On Fire). American Symphony explores a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste, chronicling his career in music (including his 11 nominations at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards) and the struggles that his wife, best-selling author Suleika Jaouad, faces with cancer. “To see these two amazing individuals navigate these highs and lows of life was incredible,” says Heineman.

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.