Interviews

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.

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.