Awards FYC 2024

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.’”

The German luminary spoke to Business Doc Europe during Cannes 2023 when presenting his new documentary Anselm and his fiction film Perfect Days. “Working on my documentaries, I always find myself trying to introduce fictional elements or at least parts of the language of fictional storytelling that I want to apply to the documentary language. And vice versa, in fictional films, I try as hard as I can to bring in documentary methods.” he said.

The values, passions and beliefs of poet Nikki Giovanni are celebrated and examined to great effect in Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson’s strikingly immersive documentary which astutely focusses on Giovanni’s opinions and work rather than taking the more customary chronological route through her life story.

Jennefer, Deirdre and Helen all had very difficult times to endure during the pandemic: bereavement, illness and isolation. How did they combat this? By bathing every day in the icy waters of Lake Michigan. Samantha Sanders’s 15-minute doc about the women has now screened at around 40 festivals, winning more than a dozen awards, and is an Oscar contender. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

It’s the crucial question but a reductive and even unanswerable one: is the fashion designer John Galliano a racist bigot? “That’s the million-dollar question…that’s what the film is answering in a way,” Scottish Oscar-winning filmmaker tells BDE of his new doc profiling the British fashion designer who was sacked by Dior after his public antisemitic rants in Paris in 2011.

Shot over 25 years, Reed Harkness’s multi award-winning documentary concerns his titular half-brother’s search for his missing mother, and the effect her disappearance had on his and her subsequent lives, as well as those of other family members. “I wanted to do a project about growth,” Harkness tells Business Doc Europe of a film that is both visually alluring and emotionally compelling. “And Sam just kind of fell into my lap as a subject.”

Luke Lorentzen won the Best Director prize at Sundance 2023 for his documentary A Still Small Voice, which follows Mati, a chaplain completing a year-long hospital residency as she learns to provide spiritual care to people confronting profound life changes. He speaks about his film with Alexander Nanau, director of Collective which, in 2021, was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film categories.

When Oscar-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams first read the book ‘Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas in America,’ he was shocked. As a Black American, he thought he knew plenty already about racism in America but author Ibram X. Kendi gave him new insights into the deep-rooted causes of that racism. “After reading the book, I saw the world differently,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

A fascinating delve into the life and work of Shere Hite and her contributions to the feminist movement, the intriguingly titled feature documentary is blessed with challenging and evocative archival material as it examines responses to her ground-breaking 1976 survey of thousands of women’s individual sexual experiences, while also detailing the modelling work she did to make ends meet while undertaking her research.

US director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, The First Wave) was in Amsterdam during IDFA this weekend. He gave a Q&A following a Soho House screening of his new feature doc American Symphony (available globally on Netflix on 29 November) that follows the Grammy and Oscar winning musical maestro Jon Batiste as he composes a major new work. Heineman also spoke to Business Doc Europe about the film.