Hot Docs 2021

When Israeli director Michal Weits showed her father her new doc Blue Box (a world premiere in World Showcase and concerning her great-grandfather, an important figure in the creation of modern-day Israel), he had to sit alone in his car to gather his thoughts after seeing it, the director tells Business Doc Europe.

The British tourist had got his calculations wrong. His plan had been to dive into the hotel swimming pool from a high window. Instead, he landed headfirst on the concrete surrounding the pool. A hotel worker was left to clear up the blood. The director gets equally stuck in with BDE...

Girl power is alive and kicking in Guðjón Ragnarsson’s documentary about an Icelandic all-girl basketball team and their uncompromising coach. But is Iceland ready to embrace, or even acknowledge, the girls’ bid for emancipation, equality and agency? Filmmaker Ragnarsson talks hoop dreams with BDE.

“The silence of my father was not a wall against me. It was somehow a mirror in which I should find a way to understand myself and to understand his message about…the fragility of life,” filmmaker Andrea Segre tells BDE of his highly personal Molecole, a cinematic ode both to his father and to Venice in lockdown.

There is an old brothel in Seville close by one of the city’s busiest highways. Now, the building has been turned into a refugee centre. This is where the subjects of Juan Antonio Moreno Amador’s effervescent new documentary Welcome To Spain have come to build themselves new lives. The director explains more…

Like many other Georgian citizens, Salomé Jashi was startled to see images of a gigantic tree floating down the Black Sea. It was on its way to the home of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire former Prime Minister of Georgia, who wanted it for his garden. Director Jashi branches out with BDE.

Flemish filmmaker Annabel Verbeke talks to Business Doc Europe about her Four Seasons In A Day, selected for Hot Docs and part of the Borderline collection, one of six creative documentaries about unknown but fascinating borders in Europe.

Kluijfhout’s meditative film serves up both stunning visuals and gentle lyric in telling the story of six very different people all motivated by their affection for, and connection to, the oyster.

Directed by Luca Lucchesi and produced by Wim Wenders, A Black Jesus poses a poignant and highly pertinent question. How can the residents of a Sicilian village worship the statue of a black Jesus but disregard the refugees who pray in the same church? The filmmaker talks to BDE.

Weits’ detailed and absorbing film has all of the elements for debate, controversy and angst as she delves into the diaries of her long-revered great grandfather hailed as one of the heroic pioneers of Israel.