Interviews

On March 20 CPH:DOX hosted a 90-minute conversation between Academy Award, BAFTA and Grammy winning British director Asif Kapadia and Thom Powers, programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, co-founder of DOC NYC and host of the Pure Non Fiction podcast. The event was part of the Morning with Filmmakers initiative organised by the festival.

At the heart of Damsgård & Klovborg’s film about the ISIS kidnapping of Danish photographer Daniel Rye is an incendiary interview, conducted by journalist Sean Langan, with two of the British kidnappers, infamously known as the Beatles. “As an interviewer, he makes just about every mistake in the handbook, but still he somehow succeeds in getting something to happen in that room that’s hard to explain,” says Klovborg.

Welcome to Funky Town, the hippest club in Chengdu, China, and the centre of the city’s thriving underground party scene. The documentary came about after Yihao, one of director Mullinkosson’s most flamboyant friends, discovered he was a filmmaker. “He asked when I would film him. I said how about Saturday night?” the director tells BDE.

As we see within each tableau vivant of Anna Hints’ Sundance-winning doc, the Estonian smoke sauna is a place for physical, emotional and psychological cleansing, for revelation and for wonderful storytelling. “That is the magic. You go into this smoke sauna and you don't care…it’s the space [where] somebody tells and somebody listens,” the director tells BDE.

“I think I decided 10 years ago that I was done with filming…that there was no reason for a guy like me to go around capturing [images] Robert Flaherty-style,” maverick Swedish co-director Göran Hugo Olsson tells BDE. He wanted to collaborate, so when the opportunity to work with artist Roxy Farhat came along, he grabbed it with both hands. “And the rest is history,” says Farhat.

Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim has been in Copenhagen this week with his new feature, Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, about the eponymous Hollywood star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1990s. “When Michael and I started working together, he asked for only one thing…The thing he asked for is no violins. He didn’t want a maudlin, pitying film about a person with a sickness,” Guggenheim tells BDE.

Finnish director Juha Suonpää may never have seen an Eurasian lynx, but the bearded and grizzled Hannu certainly has. He is a keeper of the forest, and a man who has turned his back on just about all that the 21st Century has to offer. In Lynx Man, world-premiering in CPH:DOX, Suonpää not only documents the elusive cat’s re-emergence into the wilds, but profiles the life of this shaman-like guardian of nature.

Greta Stocklassa’s feature doc, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, profiles Hans Blix, the Swedish politician who was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the man charged with the responsibility of determining whether or not Saddam Hussein was harbouring WMDs post-9/11. The director discusses Blix with BDE.

The Netflix doc follows the painstaking investigations of Rae de Leon into the disturbing number of cases of young women across the US who report sexual assault to the police, only to end up being charged themselves. “Rae absolutely doesn’t give up. She is totally pragmatic, she is polite always…and she is just so persistent,” Schwartzman tells BDE of the “self-effacing and humble” journalist.

Fredrik Gertten’s new film, a world premiere in CPH:DOX F:act Award section, takes on corrupt fraudsters and kleptocrats around the world. “The idea [behind the film] was that all frustrations and all uprisings, good or bad, around the planet, have the same source, the same anger,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.