Interviews

Prolific Oscar-winning producer John Battsek talks to Business Doc Europe about why he was determined to document the life of the German tennis great. “I’m a massive sports fan and a huge tennis fan,” says Battsek. “Talking to Boris, I got a real sense of a life lived achieving incredible things; not least six majors, an Olympic Gold, coaching Novak and being a brilliant commentator.” The film is directed by Alex Gibney.

The prolific Mario Martone talks to Business Doc Europe about his documentary profile of the legendary Italian actor, comedian and director, Massimo Troisi. Born 70 years ago, in 1953, Troisi died in 1994, aged only 41, just after appearing in Michael Radfords’s Il Postino, a performance which secured him an Oscar nomination.

Chilean auteur Maite Alberdi talks to BDE about her Sundance winner recently acquired for international sales (excluding US) by Dogwoof. Like her Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent (2020) Alberdi’s new film is also an investigation of old age, this time about the marriage between brilliant writer Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia, an actress and former Minister of Culture. They’re a devoted couple, still madly in love after over 20 years together, but Augusto has Alzheimer’s. His memory is fading.

The German feature doc follows workers cleaning up nuclear power plants in France. It’s tough, itinerant work, exposing them to radiation, potentially dangerous for their health and entailing huge amounts of travel. “Following these nomadic workers, we needed also to be nomads,” Friedrich explains why they hired their own camper van which they worked out of, and slept in, during production.

The Ukrainian/German filmmaker team were making a feature documentary about the former US military base at Schweinfurt in mid-Germany when it was re-purposed in Spring 2022 to house displaced mothers and children who had fled the war in Ukraine. In their poignantly titled short doc, in equal part playful and melancholic, we see the world through the eyes of the children now living on the compound.

In a film which blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, a European filmmaker [Dieutre himself] drives around LA in a Ford Mustang in the company of Dean, a man reminiscent a lover from years before. “Creative documentary is the place where you’ve got the maximum possibility of really thinking about the language of cinema, the form,” Dieutre reflects to Business Doc Europe.

It was only by chance that Georg Gruber noticed that his Berlin-based film sales company, founded in 2003, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. No big events are planned but he gives his word that when the company turns 25, there will be a party. "It's so funny, we kind of realised in January, oh, Jesus Christ, 20 years! It really took my surprise a bit," he tells BDE of his dawning realisation that his company has now been in existence for two decades.

Seven Winters in Tehran is a tough watch. This has nothing to do with the qualities of the film but with the incredible injustice the main protagonist and her family are subjected to. The kind of injustice we unfortunately have grown accustomed to when watching documentaries from Iran. Even so, this one still manages to put a knife through your heart.

The Netherlands-based artist and filmmaker discusses her latest film, world-premiering in Berlin, which juxtaposes Dutch archive of working life from a century ago with letters sent to her in 1980s by her late father. “Basically, it was our only contact,” Tan says of her father’s letters. “For the first five to ten years that I lived in Europe, there was this weekly rhythm. I always wrote on Thursdays…They would also reply very faithfully.”

Our Body (Notre Corps), a world premiere in Forum, was shot over a period of around six weeks in a gynaecological clinic in a hospital in Paris. The film was suggested by producer Kristina Larsen, who told Simon of her two-year fight to overcome a rare disease. In the hospital, Larsen had encountered a “mostly female world” - and this is the world that director Simon wanted to investigate, she tells BDE.