Hot Docs 24

Fifteen awards were handed out during the March 3 closing ceremony, of which 9 were won by women. The Best International Feature Documentary Award was given to Farming the Revolution by Nishta Jain, while Best Canadian Feature Documentary was named as The Soldier’s Lagoon by Pablo Álvarez-Mesa. The Special Jury Prize (International Feature Doc) was awarded to Death of a Saint by Patricia Bbaale Bandak. All awards…

Norwegian Democrazy may focus ostensibly on Lars Thorsen and Fanny Bråten, a pair of objectionable Quran-burning anti-Islam extremists, but the raison d’etre of the film is to explore the difficult overlap between ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech’ and how modern democracy is geared up to deal with this. “He knows exactly how far it can go and how far it cannot go,” co-director Kjøge Rønning says of the ‘free speech’ dilemma that Thorsen is all too keen to exploit.

Jana is one of a small number of Protestant pastors in Slovenia. But while her faith remains intact, she begins to question her commitment to life as a cleric as she is increasingly sidelined by the Church authorities. At the same time, her marriage is under severe strain, and she further confides to director Prettner, in the most candid of terms, of childhood sexual abuse that she suffered. “We spent two hours a day when we were driving, and in the car she revealed the most intimate stuff,” the director tells BDE.

Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists […who…] shared the same discomfort with the contemporary world,” director Morabito tells BDE of his friend and subject.

It may not be a hugely original premise - to invite (very) old people to talk about their lives and former partners - but Echo of Life is nevertheless a wondrous experience that touches your soul. It is a poetic reflection on life and love which indicates that, by the end, we remember what really matters, and shows how important (shared) memories are in a person's life.

Incest remains very much a taboo subject - this much can be deduced from the impressive documentary Such a Resounding Silence, in which victims are given the chance to talk about the abuse they suffered. The film is empowering in conveying the incredible resilience and mental strength of the protagonists, and also enables co-director Emmanuelle Béart - herself a victim of childhood incest who at one point wants to quit the project - to keep going.

In Malta, abortion is illegal, almost without exception. In Italy, a single woman cannot have IVF treatment, while only a small number of European countries allow for euthanasia or assisted suicide. So it is not surprising that Europe has seen a boom in cross-border “medical tourism” over recent years, a phenomenon that Greek director Elina Psykou examines in her feature doc Stray Bodies, selected for EFP’s Changing Face of Europe programme. Psykou talks to BDE.

The doc duo discuss their film in which, over the course of five weeks, they studied the lives of three Dutch teenage girls on their summer holidays at a campsite in France. “There were a lot of conversations that took place before we went [to the campsite] about love, and about who they are. There were countless hours of intimacy we had with them. [Then] at some point, they just forget you,” says co-director Natalie Bruijns of their subjects’ ease in front of camera.

Dutch-based Ukrainian filmmaker Mariia Ponomarova discusses her new film portraying a group of very competitive 50 year+ cheerleaders in Kharkiv. “We really hope that people will be excited to see Nice Ladies because it is a film full of laughter, tears and bittersweet moments, painful moments but moments that are worth living through,” says director Ponomarova.