Interviews

Visions du Réel Industry kicks off April 23 ahead of 5 days of intense but ‘relaxed’ activity, Industry head Sophie Bourdon tells BDE. Professionals will gather to do business, but they can also “step back a bit” from the renewed freneticism that inevitably followed the lifting of Covid restrictions. In 2023, 31 project teams from 32 countries will discuss their new and upcoming projects within the event’s core pitch and laboratory programmes.

Argentinean director Pedro Speroni discusses his latest documentary, which concerns the charismatic Iván Bilbaos whom the director met when making his previous documentary Rancho (2021), set inside a maximum security prison. Now Bilbaos is out of jail and back with his wife and daughter, making a living as a money lender. “I think it is a film about a guy who is trying to get ahead,” the director says. “Like a boxer, he is always fighting to have a better life.”

It’s clear that Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke sees traces of himself as a youngster in the 13-year-old Bo, the effervescent main character of his new feature documentary Planet B, a world premiere in Grand Angle at Visions du Réel. She is a teenage climate activist who, together with her friend Luca, throws herself into protests. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

It’s an area of bleak, windswept majesty. The border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan has rolling mountains and long, dry plains. It has been the site of constant skirmishes including a 44-day war in 2020. It is also the location for Daniel Kötter’s Landshaft, and the latest of several projects by the German artist and filmmaker that have dealt with what he calls ‘political geography,’ he tells BDE.

Swiss-Canadian director Peter Mettler discusses his epic new feature series While the Green Grass Grows, which is expected eventually to run for up to 12 hours. Parts one and six are an elegy for his parents, whose passing they chronicle. “For me, it’s…almost a way of going through that process; of becoming an orphan, being an only child as well and [with] no other family. It was very much a separation from my family,” the director reflects to BDE on the loss he experienced.

‘A person who dies without a name is like a story without an ending,’ reads the logline for Pure Unknown, screening in VdR Int'l Competition. The core objective of Italian forensic pathologist Cristina Cattaneo, profiled in the film, is to find an ending for as many stories as possible. “I completely fell in love with…her mission and her ethical approach to her work, to her life and to the lives of others,” co-director Mattia Colombo tells BDE.

It sounds like something out of a Michael Mann film. Iván Simonovis, formerly one of Venezuela’s top police officers, is under strict house arrest on trumped up charges. He cuts off the security tag on his ankle, clambers down a very high wall, is spirited away by well-wishers, goes into hiding and eventually escapes Venezuela on a speed boat. His son Iván discusses with BDE the film he made of his father’s extraordinary life.

Emilie Bujès, head of the Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel, outlines the appeal of an event that does more than most to extend the boundaries of documentary. The festival presents 163 films in 2023, and special guests include international luminaries Lucrecia Martel and Alice Rohrwacher, and Swiss director Jean-Stéphane Bron. “It’s more ‘visions’ than ‘réel’ in terms of what we are interested in,” Bujès tells BDE. “It’s more people looking at something, rather than the something itself.”

Last week CPH:DOX hosted a chat with Academy Award-winning US documentary filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin who discussed their latest endeavour, Wild Life, produced by National Geographic Films. The conversation was moderated by Thom Powers, programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, co-founder of DOC NYC and host of the Pure Non Fiction podcast.

CPH:DOX last week hosted a conversation on the craft of doc with two brilliant women filmmakers – Estonia’s Anna Hints, director of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood and Chile’s Maite Alberdi, director of The Eternal Memory, both Sundance-winning films. The talk, moderated by film journalist Wendy Mitchell, focused on these docs, in particular on their protagonists’ vulnerability, the directors’ sense of moral compass and some of their artistic and technical choices.