Cannes 2022

Spanish director Ainara Vera tells Business Doc Europe about her dramatic and at times sumptuous new doc Polaris, selected for Cannes ACID, that tells of two French sisters whose lives are polar opposites: Hayat, the immensely capable skipper of a boat that traverses the freezing Arctic Sea between Iceland and Greenland, and her younger sister Leila, not long out of jail and soon to give birth to the baby Inaya.

The multi-layered documentary takes you on a journey through the minds and worlds of three like-minded and intrinsically connected thinkers and artists. Filmmaker Jose Luis Lopez Linares had the good fortune to film French writer Jean-Claude Carrière a year before his untimely death as he retraces Goya’s footsteps, all the time expounding lyrically on art, history, humanity and love.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica premiered in the 2022 edition of Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. The film is made by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, directors of Leviathan. The producers are Norte Productions, CG Cinema, Rita Productions and the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Brussels-based producer Maarten Schmidt comes to European Film Promotion’s showcase for leading producers with four projects, two of which (The Last Frontier and Under the Surface) are feature docs, another of which (Exit Tales) is a 6 x 12-minute animated series based on the voice-recorded interviews of six child refugees. Schmidt talks the magic of documentary with Business Doc Europe.

Doc Alliance, a network of seven of the most influential European documentary film festivals, announced May 24 the winners of its 15th annual Doc Alliance Awards during Doc Day of the Festival de Cannes. Best Feature went to A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia and In the Billowing Night won Best Short. Nataša Urban’s The Eclipse received a Special Mention.

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa discusses his latest documentary, about the little attention paid to the suffering of Germans after the 2WW carpet bombing of cities such as Dresden. It is a film with much contemporary resonance, as it is selected for Cannes even as the war continues to rage in Ukraine.

For his directorial debut, Ethan Coen offers up a vibrant and often exhilarating look at the turbulent life of a true rock’n’roll legend, dealing with the demons that drove Jerry Lee Lewis. To an extent this is a non-judgmental film that is as much about his determined resilience as it is the scandals that haunted his life, but it is also tight and lean, brimming with mesmerising footage and illuminating interviews.

Hot Docs award-winning producer Johannes Schubert (Austria) outlines to BDE his plans for the 2022 EFP programme and explains his fascination both for the doc form and its practitioners. "Documentary filmmakers are incredibly kind and open-minded people. They are ambassadors for a better world and are courageous. I am longing for collaboration with them, and together we always try to challenge the status quo."

The Docs-in-Progress awards were handed out at May 24 at the end of the market’s headline Doc Day. Top cash awards went to the CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator Showcase Twice Colonized directed by Lin Alluna (IEFTA Award, €10,000), while Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias (won the Al Jazeera Documentary Award, which entails a co-production deal with a minimum contribution of $15,000. All awards.

The May 21 Scandinavian Showcase is one of eight country/regional presentations of soon to be finalised docs-in-progress, presented at Cannes Docs. The showcases are primarily designed for decision makers looking for new titles, in particular festival programmers and sales agents. In some cases the projects are also looking for post-production funding or general gap financing, and some are still open to co-production opportunities.