Berlin/EFM 2023

Combining diaristic film footage of society/nature with 3D scanner images, Czech filmmaker Viera Čákanyová playfully and provocatively explores the potential of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to deal with complex global problems. Notes from Eremocene (Poznámky z Eremocénu) world-premieres in Berlinale Forum.

The prolific Mario Martone talks to Business Doc Europe about his documentary profile of the legendary Italian actor, comedian and director, Massimo Troisi. Born 70 years ago, in 1953, Troisi died in 1994, aged only 41, just after appearing in Michael Radfords’s Il Postino, a performance which secured him an Oscar nomination.

Dearest Fiona, an art film by Fiona Tan having its world premiere in Berlinale’s Forum section, consists of two very different elements. We see scenes from silent Dutch documentaries, showing life at the beginning of the 20th century. And we hear an actor reading letters her father wrote to her around 1988/89. I went looking for a way to connect the two. The production company behind the film is called Antithesis Films. That’s an interesting name. Let’s use that as a starting point…

The seventeen up-and-coming European documentary film producers were introduced to the Berlin Film Festival guests at an event hosted 17 February by the Ji.hlava IDFF, together with the European Film Market. The educational, promotional and networking EMERGING PRODUCERS programme is curated by Ji.hlava IDFF and includes workshops in Jihlava (October 2023) and Berlin (February 2024).

The stunning scenery of the Austrian Alps acts as the perfect backdrop for Bernhard Braunstein’s absorbing doc about acclaimed ski boarding school Stams, where top young skiing talent chase their dreams. For these fresh-faced youngsters it is all about the possibility of making the Olympics, but their journey also includes strict exercise, academic lessons as well as battles with the dangerously icy slopes.

Some perspectives can only be revealed by insiders. That can provide unexpected insights, present unknowable facts and deliver very uncomfortable truths, as in this unvarnished portrait of a gold mining village in Burkina Faso, in which the prospect of redemptive wealth holds the inhabitants in an iron stranglehold.

Chilean auteur Maite Alberdi talks to BDE about her Sundance winner recently acquired for international sales (excluding US) by Dogwoof. Like her Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent (2020) Alberdi’s new film is also an investigation of old age, this time about the marriage between brilliant writer Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia, an actress and former Minister of Culture. They’re a devoted couple, still madly in love after over 20 years together, but Augusto has Alzheimer’s. His memory is fading.

The German feature doc follows workers cleaning up nuclear power plants in France. It’s tough, itinerant work, exposing them to radiation, potentially dangerous for their health and entailing huge amounts of travel. “Following these nomadic workers, we needed also to be nomads,” Friedrich explains why they hired their own camper van which they worked out of, and slept in, during production.

The Ukrainian/German filmmaker team were making a feature documentary about the former US military base at Schweinfurt in mid-Germany when it was re-purposed in Spring 2022 to house displaced mothers and children who had fled the war in Ukraine. In their poignantly titled short doc, in equal part playful and melancholic, we see the world through the eyes of the children now living on the compound.

In his highly engaging feature debut, Guinean director Thierno Souleymane Diallo sets out to find the lost first film by a Black filmmaker from francophone Africa, 1953’s Mouramani by compatriot Mamadou Touré. The quest seems at times both disheartening and optimistic, but watching Diallo’s efforts is as easy as taking a walk in the park. Although a lot happens, the film just glides through it all, propelled by the director’s winning personality and his unwavering optimism about his craft and his art.