Awards 25/26

The picturesque southern town of the Natchez may well conjure up grand, elegiac associations, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll discover the place’s shameful history. While many within the white community still invoke the spirit of Gone With The Wind, both in how they dress and how they conduct themselves, it is Rev, a Black preacher, who shows visitors to the town the devastating legacy of human exploitation. Director Suzannah Herbert discusses her film with Business Doc Europe.

Ukrainian director Alina Maksimenko talks to Business Doc Europe about her feature documentary, in which she joins her mother and father in their village after the Russian invasion of February 24 2022. Also a painter, Maksimenko no longer turns to the canvas in order to express herself artistically. “As a painter, I love beautiful things: beautiful light, beautiful streets, I love light in the air. I used to bring beauty into my paintings. But this beauty just became impossible from the beginning of the war.”

Told in five distinct acts that span the period between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, the Czech Republic's candidate for an Oscar in the International Feature Film category, chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation undertaken by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her story is told using approximately 3000 still photographs and the diaries she kept from those years.

US-based Hong Kong director Elizabeth Lo and editor Charlotte Munch Bengtsen discuss Mistress Dispeller with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Shaunak Sen (All That Breathes, 2022). “There is something that this doc gets at that usually documentary films aren't able to access,” says Sen during their chat. “This is arguably one of the first films I've ever seen which is able to get into the innards and entrails of that subterranean world [of the characters] - which I think is marvellous.”

Petra Costa’s documentary investigates the toxic link between evangelical Christianity and political governance within her home country of Brazil, most notably under the regime of Jair Bolsonaro. The Netflix doc presents the former-president as almost puppet-like in his devotion to the firebrand tele-evangelist Silas Malafaia. “We knew they had an intimate political relationship, but as we watched the material, it became so evident the kind of subservience and reverence that Bolsonaro had for Malafaia,” says Costa, who is joined in interview by producer Alessandra Orofino.

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the framework for his film One to One: John & Yoko. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells Business Doc Europe of his scorching feature doc Orwell: 2+2=5, a strong awards contender.

Director Eugene Jarecki, Stella Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson reflect on Jarecki’s documentary which analyses the treatment meted out to journalist and whistle-blower Julian Assange by numerous governments, including those of the UK and US. “I think there is a story here that is so explosive for the public, so revealing and so much about today, that there is going to be a massive appetite for it.” Jarecki says of his film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes 2025, and is now an awards front-runner.

Roger Ross Williams (Stamped From The Beginning) speaks to Geeta Gandbhir about her Sundance-winning feature doc The Perfect Neighbor, which presents a devastating critique of race, inequality and the vigilante-style ‘stand your ground’ legislation in operation in the US today, and which details the events leading up to the murder of Gandbhir’s friend Ajike Owens. The director recalled the conversation she had with Ajike’s mother Pam in terms of the outreach support she could offer after the tragic loss. “I have no money to give you. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a lawyer…but I think I can make a film.”

Using footage shot by inmates themselves on cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman show how squalor, violence and degradation have become commonplace in American jails. At the heart of the documentary is Robert Earl, a long-term prisoner with little chance of parole who has become a leader and spokesperson for the other inmates. “I do feel when we talk to him, it’s as if we are talking to Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben island,” Jarecki tells BDE of their campaigning doc.