Berlin 2022

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be OK won a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in Berlin earlier this week. It’s a bleak essayistic documentary which uses both archive material and clay figurines to tell a story of cruelty and destruction. The Oscar-nominated Cambodian filmmaker discusses his documentary with Business Doc Europe.

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be Ok in Main Competition, three world premiere documentaries in Encounters and six docs in Berlinale Special section, including Lucrecia Martel’s Terminal norte (North Terminal) and a world prem of Andrew Dominik’s This Much I Know To Be True, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Swedish director Magnus Gertten’s film, also nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award, “exemplifies the necessity of queer history and queer collective memory of World War II while providing long-needed recognition of the forgotten victims and survivors of the Holocaust,” says the jury citation. The TEDDY AWARDS combine a network of over 180 queer film festivals from across the world.

With no Doc Salon in 2022, Dennis Ruh, Director of the European Film Market, and Martina Valentina Baumgartner, EFM Documentary Coordinator, answer questions posed by Business Doc Europe about how they plan to tackle docs, the needs of doccers and all issues pertaining to the documentary sector during the upcoming edition, running 10-17 February.

Young German docmaker Sarah Noa Bozenhardt has been at Berlin this week as part of the “Face To Face With German Films” event highlighting 7 up-and-coming young German talents. It was also an opportunity for Bozenhardt to talk up her recent film Among Us Women, which premiered in DOK Leipzig International Competition 2022. And as she reveals to BDE, she also grew up in the circus.

The first film selected for Berlinale from the Central African Republic, We, Students! is a complex study both of the country’s youth and a university education system which is both physically rundown and seemingly blighted by corruption. Director Rafiki and producer Boris Lojkine speak to Business Doc Europe.

Love, Deutschmarks and Death…it sounds like the title of one of those acerbic Fassbinder melodramas of the 1970s. In fact, this is the name of the new feature documentary from director Cem Kaya about the Turkish music scene in Germany and which, last month, won the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award. Kaya gets musical with Business Doc Europe.

Two years on from the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) launch at Berlinale 2020, co-directors Brigid O’Shea and Marion Schmidt remind Business Doc Europe of the association’s raison d’être, explain its modus operandi, underline the importance of docfests both as thought hubs and venues for business/creative interaction, and give an overview of DAE activities during Berlin 2022.

Our Body (Notre Corps), a world premiere in Forum, was shot over a period of around six weeks in a gynaecological clinic in a hospital in Paris. The film was suggested by producer Kristina Larsen, who told Simon of her two-year fight to overcome a rare disease. In the hospital, Larsen had encountered a “mostly female world” - and this is the world that director Simon wanted to investigate, she tells BDE.

The first thing to note about Everything Will Be OK, world-premiering in Berlinale Competition, is that you will have never seen anything quite like it. And that in itself should be enough to make you want to experience the latest work by Cambodia’s leading arthouse filmmaker, in which animals in the near future have taken over the role of totalitarian tyrants that we, as humans, have so far reserved for ourselves.