Interviews

The feature documentary Dispatch - a prose poem to life and a paean to grief, longing and nostalgia - immerses us into the mind of Indian director Anu Vaidyanathan after the death of her much-loved mother-in-law, a mathematician from pre-Partition Punjab. “The making of it felt a bit like a fever dream,” the director tells BDE of her feature doc, which world-premiered at BAFICI (Buenos Aires). “I think the upside of grief is you have extreme clarity about what you don't want, and I did not want one more day, one more hour spent imagining a time when I would have a completed film.”

Tin Castle may have been presented as a Work-in-Progress in Nyon this week but audiences won’t have long to wait for the completed feature. The French-Irish co-production (previously titled A Road Less Travelled) will have its world premiere in Critics’ Week in Cannes next month. In the doc, director Alexander Murphy follows the O’Reillys, an Irish traveller family living in a fixed caravan. French producer Cosme Bongrain explains more…

My Skin And I, the new project from artists and filmmakers Milton Guillén and Fiona Guy Hall, is generating buzz even before its completion. It won two awards at VDR Industry this week after being presented in the works in progress section, and has already secured funding from both US and European sources. “The project really lives in this space where the political intersects with the personal and [looks at] how these two aspects of our lives are fundamentally intertwined,” Guy Hall tells BDE.

In Nyon, the producer/director team of Johnny Brewin and Laura Plancarte presented their project Boom!, the story of George and Sonia, a boxing couple in West London. The pair run a successful gym. They’ve got kids and are very much in love. They are also hyper competitive. “We are chasing the rush,” notes director Plancarte, who identifies closely with her subjects. “Obviously, I don’t put myself at risk like they do. But as an independent filmmaker, you need to do 10 roles yourself…and it is exhausting. Why do I choose this [as a career]? I am the same as them…I cannot think about everything else!”

In Edgar Hagen’s new film, The Roots Of Madness (screening in The National Competition at Visions Du Réel), the filmmaker accompanies the near-legendary German war reporter Ulrich Tilgner on a journey back to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. “The special thing about him is that he always tried to understand the people, not only the politics,” Hagen observes of the journalist’s humanistic, ground-level approach to his work.

In his essay-style documentary, director G. Anthony Svatek uses the story of Alexander von Humboldt, once the world’s most famous scientist, as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues. “I thought the strongest way to do that is in the form of a love letter from me to him, showing him what is left of his vision of an interconnected world and how technology has totally changed this idea of a holistic ecology that he proposed.”

Ghost Town (screening in official selection in Vision Du Réel) joins the growing ranks of documentaries and docudramas set in taxis. The setting is Kamaishi, a small Japanese town where the locals haven’t been able to exorcise memories of the devastating 2011 tsunami. As we discover, the catastrophe still dominates the conversations and even the dreams of the local people. Director Katharine Round discusses her new work with BDE.

A Fire There (sold by Filmotor) sees Montreal-based filmmaker Marlene Edoyan venturing to the remote village of Gandzani, a predominantly Armenian enclave within southern Georgia. Her three main characters are young men on the cusp of adulthood and facing familiar decisions about their future. “It was like finding a part of my past almost,” Edoyan says. “I came across a group of people [and] recognised something very familiar, maybe a fragment of my story of displacement.”

It is well known that in space, nobody can hear you scream, but in the case of the astronauts on the 1973 NASA Skylab mission, nobody could hear their demands for better working conditions either. Everything the crew did was measured by their controllers in Houston who wanted as much data as possible about how humans coped in space - and didn’t care a jot for their well-being. In his new feature doc, nominated by Visions du Réel for the Doc Alliance Prize, UK doccer Graeme Arnfield investigates the incident further. He reports in to BDE.

Shot in the Persian Gulf, the feature doc Heat, directed by Jacqueline Zünd, deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. “It's like a magnifying glass amplifying all these differences, especially the economic and social disparities,” Zünd tells Business Doc Europe. “Because there is a certain [very high] temperature, rich people do not leave their houses anymore… Meanwhile, the poor people are dying out there, or maybe having heatstroke, while delivering food at noon when they call for lunch. It's really crazy.”