EFAs 24

In what feels like a cinematic counterpart to Ivo Andrić’s literary masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina, Swiss filmmaker Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape and the Fury, longlisted for the European Film Awards 2024, juxtaposes the natural tranquility of the north-western Bosnian landscape with the fury of human struggles past and present, as modern-day refugees pass through areas still mined after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Exiled Iranian director Farahnaz Sharifi talks to Business Doc Europe about her film which tells a parallel history of Iran since the 1979 revolution, culled from personal archives. “At a time when power structures strive to narrate history in ways that hide important and popular segments, it becomes all the more crucial to share personal details and micro-narratives,” says Farahnaz. Sold by CAT&Docs, My Stolen Planet is long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards, 2024.

In Limbo (W zawieszeniu) is an intimate and insightful look at the war in Ukraine as seen from the viewpoint of a very particular family, and presented in a very personal form. Set against other films from Ukraine which focus on frontline battles, the film is a welcome and moving glimpse into the lives of an ordinary family unit at the onset of the conflict. The film is long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards, 2024.

The statistics are stark. More than 400,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past 20 years. In his new feature documentary Marching In The Dark (sold by Lightdox and long-listed for Best Documentary for the European Film Awards 2024), Kinshuk Surjan explores the circumstances leading to this tragic loss of life. He spoke to Business Doc Europe before the film’s world premiere at CPH:DOX.

Direct Action, long-listed for Best Documentary ahead of the European Film Awards 2024, documents the everyday lives within one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France. The filmmakers’ intentions were straightforward. As co-director Russell puts it, “the goal was to spend time with people we really admired and to spend time in a place that is mysterious, and to understand [it] for ourselves.”

Paris-based French-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film (long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards 2024) that documents four generations of women in her family, one of whom is the internationally renowned actress Hiam Abbass, the director’s mother. “It's as if the women of my family…each represent a piece of history, a piece of time that doesn't exist anymore,” says Soualem.

In At Averroès & Rosa Parks (long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards 2024), French documentary master Nicolas Philibert continues his exploration of mental illness and its treatments in French hospitals. “Making movies is my solution to keep balance in my life,” the director tells BDE. “The people I film are very vulnerable but they reflect back something I have inside me too.”

Chaplin, Spirit of the Tramp (screening at Festival Lumière in Lyon following its world premiere last month in San Sebastián, where it won the Irizar Basque Film Award) is a deceptive affair. The documentary offers startling new insights into the family background of Charlie Chaplin, arguably the most famous movie star of the 20th Century…and his son Michael for whom Charlie’s celebrity was a huge burden. Director Carmen Chaplin, Charlie’s grand-daughter, tells more to BDE.

Jazz and decolonization are inextricably linked in Johan Grimonprez’s masterful study of Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960, the rise of pan-Africanism, the inevitable neo-colonial backlash, and the murder/assassination of Congo’s newly elected PM Patrice Lumumba in February 1961. And about the CIA’s use of jazz legends as a smokescreen for covert operations far beyond US. “History writing is always about re-writing,” Grimonprez tells BDE. “It's trying to look at what's not been written, at what's fallen between the cracks.”

12 feature-length docs have been chosen for the Documentary Film section of the upcoming European Film Awards 2024. The selection honours “the greatest achievements in European cinema,” the Academy writes. Based on the subsequent votes of all members, the nominations will be made public on 5 November 2024, before the winner is announced on 7 December in Lucerne during the European Film Awards ceremony.