Berlin 2022

The recent Oscar nomination for Austrian-based doc sales outfit Autlook for Writing With Fire (pictured) continues the company’s impressive awards run. It follows on from such other Autlook titles such as For Sama and Of Fathers And Sons which have been prominent in past awards campaigns. Company CEO Salma Abdalla talks docs, sales and award strategies to BDE.

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.

Director Beckermann advertised a casting call for a film based on a notorious Viennese pornographic novel from 1906. Her subsequent doc sees 75 men confronted with excerpts from the book. “I made the film also as a kind of test. How will people - the public and society - react to it? Where do we stand today? Is it possible today to show such a film, or will there be wokeness against it?” she asks BDE.

Raul Domingues’ new feature documentary was shot in the fields and forests surrounding the family farm in Portugal and its main character - that tough, gnarled-looking old woman still carrying out back-breaking work - is the director’s grandmother. There is nothing easy about the lifestyle Domingues depicts, but his love for the land is apparent in every frame of the doc.

Producer Hubertus Siegert, CEO of spicefilm GmbH, explains to BDE how Simon Brückner’s provocative new documentary, about populist German right-wing party AfD (Alternative For Germany), was conceived, and why it is likely to have the effect of a foot being plunged into a hornet’s nest when it is released in Germany by Majestic in April.

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.

Young love has been a mainstay of film and television drama for many years, but rarely, if ever, has it made the transition to documentary. The delicate, challenging and complex emotions that define young love are at the gentle heart of this film from Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes, a hybrid film that is honest and subtly moving without ever being exploitative or traumatic.

As the song goes, diamonds are forever…but are they? They may well represent the grandest of romantic gestures and are often priced as the most expensive bauble a person might own, but as Jason Kohn’s fascinating and provocative documentary examines, the little-discussed infiltration of the jewellery market by synthetic diamonds could have massive implications in years to come.

Clin d’Oeil Films (Belgium) and Hard Working Movies (US) announced March 10 that Martin Scorsese has boarded Belgian directors Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier’s documentary Dreaming Walls, which world-premiered at Berlin, as exec producer. “Dreaming Walls is a multi-dimensional cinematic requiem for the Hotel Chelsea as it once was - the epicenter of a Bohemian New York that now exists only in memory,” says Scorsese.

There may be no DocSalon at EFM 2022, but today (Feb 15) the focus is on Archive, albeit scaled down from previous years. Experts Adelheid Heftberger (Bundesarchiv), Simon Witter (British Pathé) and researcher/producers Monika Preischl and Elizabeth Klinck preview today's events and explain to Business Doc Europe how the past two years have been a boom time for the sector.