Cannes 2024

The Brazilian filmmakers immerse themselves within Yanomami culture for their Cannes film, inspired by a book of the same name written by shaman Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. “Seeing, listening and dreaming” are at the heart of Yanomami culture and rituals. The Yanomami have a deep empathy with other animals. Unlike the whites, they don’t see themselves as being “at the top of creation” and they don’t “treat everything and everyone else as a resource,” co-director Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha reflects.

French director Yolande Zauberman’s documentary La belle de Gaza, which world-premiered May 17 as a Special Screening at Cannes, has an unapologetically straightforward approach to the trans women it portrays - which is both its weakness and its strength. One thing to note: the film isn’t set in, nor is it about, Gaza.

Cuba and Alaska are two female paramedics working on the frontline in the war against Russia. Serving in the Ukrainian army is obligatory for men, but not for women. These paramedics are therefore volunteers, determined to serve best their country. “This film is about the experience of war from a female perspective, how to be a woman during the full-scale invasion in Ukraine,” says producer Olha Beskhmelnytsina of 2Brave Productions ahead of the May 18 pitch at Cannes Docs.

Frontline is one of two Ukrainian projects being pitched at Cannes Docs 2024 on May 18. It is directed by Alisa Kovalenko who, after the full-scale Russian invasion, went to fight on the Eastern front, leaving her four-year-old son behind. “I felt that I cannot make cinema [anymore], and I didn't see any sense in it. I died for myself as a director,” she tells BDE. “But while I was on the frontline, I also felt that it's important to save memories for my son because I didn't know when or if I will see him again.”

Scottish Documentary Institute Director Flore Cosquer talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the May 18 “tartan” pitch of four new projects at Cannes Docs. “For me, the fact that we have a lot of co-production is really a testament to the dynamism of Scotland,” Conquer says of the increasing trend for Scottish directors and producers like those headed to Cannes to look for international support.

“The film's reflective narrative about Angelica's love for her [former] high school teacher, a French woman in her forties named Miss S, is both captivating and highly relatable,” says producer Brynhildur Þórarinsdóttir of her Swedish Cannes Docs project. “At its core, the film delves into desire as a potent force, encapsulating the essence of yearning and the existential solitude that accompanies it.”

Norwegian Lene Berg is visited by the ghost of her long-dead father, the renowned director Arnljot Berg who, in 1975, was charged with the murder of his third wife. Now, the ghost demands his daughter must start asking the right questions. But what are the right questions? “The perfect investor [in this film] is the investor who believes in art first,” says producer Ellen Ugelstad. “Lene Berg is sculpting a narrative from all aspects of the cinematic range. She is a bold, unwavering artist, who soars past boundaries and defines new territory in her films.”

Producer Malene Flindt Pedersen of Hansen & Pedersen discusses her upcoming Danish/Spanish feature co-pro, set deep within a vulnerable southern Galicia, and presented within the Cannes Docs Nordics Showcase May 17. “Only On Earth will be a cinematic, visually stunning and captivating film about wild horses, cowboys, wild fires and a world tipping out of balance,” Pedersen tells BDE.

Markku Heikkinen’s The Arctic Circle of Lust examines the hidden sexuality of northern Finnish family men which is hidden from their spouses, friends and the surrounding community. “In the film, the viewer gets close to very sensitive…situations in the painful moments of relationships,” says Finnish producer Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen. “The film is intimate and of high visual quality, [depicting] archaic nature and its four seasons, from the darkness of ‘kaamos’ to spring thaw, providing a stark backdrop for private moments.”

For two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, director Sergei Loznitsa filmed life across Ukraine. A companion piece to his remarkable 2014 documentary Maidan, about Ukraine’s civil uprising against political alignment with Russia, The Invasion shows the Ukrainian people to be just as stoic and resilient in times of war.