Interviews

“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.

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.