Interviews

It’s 13 years since Flore Cosquer joined the Scottish Documentary Institute, which celebrates its 20th anniversary next year. Last summer, she became SDI Director, taking over from irrepressible founder Noe Mendelle. Now Cosquer is promising a new “chapter” at the organisation which has been at the heart of the Scottish doc scene for these two past decades.

Artist and filmmaker Guido van der Werve, who nearly died in 2016 following a terrifying cycling accident, talks about his searingly honest and highly audacious new film. “It wasn’t easy work,” van der Werve concedes of the process of making it. “I was so badly injured, so at the beginning I was nothing. Then I tried to figure out what happened, as we humans do.”

Roman Liubyi’s film concerns the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, for which the Russians were responsible but have done everything they can to cover their tracks and shift the blame. “One of the central goals from the very beginning was [to show] the Russian media activity round it [the tragedy],” he tells BDE of his determination to examine how the Russian propaganda machine works.

“The main thing that I feel sets Is There Anybody Out There? apart from a lot of other disability films (if I may be so bold), is that it is nothing to do with a medical condition really, and all to do with disabled people being perfect just as we are,” UK filmmaker Ella Glendining tells Business Doc Europe on arrival in Park City for the world premiere of her autobiographical doc.

“Max and me have, for many, many years, been interested in the consequences of the photographic image and the impact of the photographic image on society,” Axel Danielson explains to BDE of their new film world-premiering at Sundance. “You could say literature is master at going inside people’s heads and showing what is going on there, but the photographic image is just amazing in showing how things play out.”

When Shere Hite’s study of female sexuality, ‘The Hite Report’, was published in the US in 1976, it became a runaway bestseller and its author was turned into a national celebrity. The work “taught me so many things I don’t think I’ve seen discussed, talked about or written about anywhere else, even to this day,” filmmaker Nicole Newnham tells Business Doc Europe.

Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day In September), sat down with Daniel Roher and Bulgarian Christo Grozev, director of and key protagonist within the highly acclaimed documentary Navalny, about the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the subsequent (and shocking) investigation into the crime.

In her new film, which won The Golden Lion in Venice and which is now in contention for an Oscar, Laura Poitras (a previous Academy Award winner with Citizenfour) shows how campaigning artist Nan Goldin, together with advocacy group PAIN, takes on the notorious Sacklers, a very wealthy family that got even richer through sales of the highly addictive opioid OxyContin.

Oscar-nominated Danish documentary maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee) spoke to Sara Dosa about her hotly tipped feature doc Fire of Love which tells the story of the doomed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. “It was their character, their personalities, their philosophies which were so embodied in their life story,” she explains of the fascination she developed for her intrepid subjects.

It’s a year now since US director Alex Pritz’s Oscar contender The Territory premiered to rave reviews at Sundance. The film, which was picked up by National Geographic, explores the conflict between the indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest and the settlers who want to cut down the trees and seize their land. Pritz explains more to BDE.