Interviews

Indian filmmaker and photographer Kartiki Gonsalves grew up very close to the Mudumulai Reserve in Tamil Nadu where her remarkable short documentary was made, she explains to BDE. The film, backed by Netflix and on the Oscar trail, is about a couple who adopt an abandoned baby elephant, nurse him back to health and form a very deep bond with him in the process.

Danish producer Monica Hellström already has two Oscar noms to her credit, both for the 2021 film Flee, in the Best Doc and Best Animated Feature categories last year. Now, she is back in the running for awards, for Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters. What’s more, after more than a decade working with production company Final Cut For Real, she set up her own outfit, Ström Films, last summer.

When Daniel Roher was introduced to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Kyiv in 2020, the Canadian docmaker knew his career was set to change forever. “Once I was confronted with Navalny and this extraordinary story, I saw my destiny unfold. I knew exactly what this was going to be. I understood that this was what I had been looking for my whole life, telling a story of this magnitude and importance,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Justice is at last being served for Martha Mitchell, the woman whose Cassandra-like role in exposing the Watergate scandal has been ignored for too long. Filmmakers Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy talk to BDE about their new short doc, shortlisted for the Oscars, that tells Mitchell’s story. “She was definitely a hidden figure. She has essentially been erased from Watergate history,” suggests Alvergue.

Oscar winner James Marsh (Man On Wire, 2008) talks to Matthew Heineman about the powerful new doc Retrograde which captures the final 9 months of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan from multiple perspectives: one of the last U.S. Special Forces units deployed there, a young Afghan general and his corps defending their homeland from the Taliban, and the civilians desperately attempting to flee as the country collapses.

IDFA chief Orwa Nyrabia discusses the Oscar shortlisted Descendant with director Margaret Brown. The films tells the story of the descendants of the last known enslaved Africans who were brought to the United States aboard the ship Clotilda. “How can there be people in my family that I love but who are also racist?” asks Brown, who grew up in Mobile, Alabama. “That's a paradox to me…How do I reckon with that? How do I make art about that?”

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia talks to Indian director Shaunak Sen about the Sundance-winning All That Breathes, one of the front-runners in the race for this year’s Feature Doc Oscar. The film follows two brothers in a polluted Delhi who dedicate their lives to protecting the abundant but magnificent black kites that circle the skies above the city. “I would say it began with a vague interest in a kind of abstract triangulation of air, birds, humans,” Sen tells Kapadia.

In Melanie Manchot’s feature debut (in late post-production), a recovering alcohol and substance addict re-enacts moments from his own chaotic past life as he takes on the acting role of historical embezzler Thomas Goudie, whose public arrest in 1901 was reconstructed on celluloid (BFI Archive). Part observational doc and part fiction, all the support roles in STEPHEN are played by former or recovering addicts. “The shoot was probably the best three and a half weeks of my life,” Manchot tells BDE. “And I think for most of the cast as well.”

Why now? 37 years after the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium which led to the deaths of 39 football fans at the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool FC and Juventus, four separate dramatised and doc focus on one of the darkest nights in football history. Arguably, the most high profile of the projects is Jan Verheyen and Jean-Philippe Leclaire’s docu series The Heysel Tragedy. Verheyen talks to BDE.

When film director Jay Rosenblatt’s daughter Ella turned two, be began a ritual that would last until she was 18. Every time she had a birthday, he would sit her down on the same couch and ask her pretty much the same questions. He would film her answers. Now, his 29-minute documentary How Do You Measure A Year, made from all the footage shot on Ella’s birthdays, has made it onto the short list for the Oscars.