Interviews

Anaïs Clanet, head of sales and acquisitions at French outfit Reservoir Docs, is in ebullient mood on the eve of the European Film Market (in its first physical edition since 2020). “All our buyers are coming back. Whether it is from America or Asia, everybody is back. It feels like there is an energy and a willingness to meet up and discuss what they can buy for next year,” she tells Business Doc Europe.

When she spoke to BDE, Autlook CEO Salma Abdalla was just back from Sundance where Estonian director Anna Hints’ Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was rapturously received, winning the Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary category. Abdalla outlines her slate at EFM 2023.

The German Films MD looks forward to a busy Berlinale in which locally produced (and co-produced) docs feature highly, with four new docs in Perspectives Deutsches Kino section for emerging filmmakers, and two Forum selections; veteran auteur’s Volker Koepp’s Leaving And Staying and Luís Alejandro Yero’s Calls From Moscow. That said, these are tough times for documentary in the German theatrical marketplace, she tells BDE.

The world has changed a lot since the launch, in February 2020, of DAE (Documentary Association of Europe). Three years ago, after we all waved goodbye to Berlinale, everything came to a shuddering Covid-induced halt. But like the rest of the doc industry, DAE founders Brigid O’Shea and Marion Schmidt rolled up their sleeves and got on with it, in their case building an organisation that would represent and lobby for the rights and interests of international documentary makers.

Doccers are well catered for at EFM 2023, Market chief Dennis Ruh and Doc Industry Co-ordinator Martina Baumgartner tell BDE. 20% of market screenings are docs, there’s an extensive programme of non-fiction talks, a new doc hub and, once again, a dedicated Archive Day. And a whopping 59 documentaries are screening at the festival. What’s more, professionals will get the answer to a fundamental question at EFM. Are documentary makers good people at heart?

A House Made Of Splinters, the heartbreaking Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont and produced by Monica Hellström, has left an inspiring legacy. The film led directly to the formation of the Ukrainian charitable foundation, Voices Of Children, which now has a team of 60 psychologists who help kids across the country deal with the trauma of war, and is supported by the likes of Madonna and Oprah Winfrey.

Filmmaker Shaunak Sen discusses how his Oscar-nominated doc All That Breathes took flight. “There is no film, in a way, without Rise Films. They’re phenomenally important,” the director says of the production company whose other credits include Icarus and The Invisible War. “Teddy [Leifer] and I became like a pitching machine. We pitched ad infinitum…”

Available on The New Yorker website, the short doc Haulout highlights the ongoing crisis faced by migratory animals living in the Arctic, among them 100,000 walruses, whose very existence is threatened by global warming. “What is happening in the Arctic Ocean will impact us here in the UK, in America, in the south, everywhere…this is what our film is about,” says Evgenia Arbugaeva.

British editor/director Giles Gardner talks to Business Doc Europe about the film he co-directed with Oscar-winning US filmmaker James Ivory, about the hitherto unseen footage of Afghanistan that the latter shot over 60 years ago, and how his identification with eastern culture proved to be life-changing. “I wanted to find out what he was thinking at the time, and who he was at the time,” says Gardner of his illustrious friend.

On February 5, Docpoint (Helsinki) will screen In Spring, a joyful silent film depicting life in Kyiv in 1929, to raise funds for the Ukrainian Docudays festival. It will be accompanied by a live score composed and performed by Ukrainian Roksana Smirnova and Misha Kalinin. Leading doc consultant Martijn te Pas appeals to more European festivals to programme this film for Ukraine, and interviews musicians Roksana and Misha for BDE.