Interviews

In María Molina Peiró’s Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), a remote robot searches a distant planet both for minerals and signs of life, while far way, beside one of the oldest mines in the world, inhabitants live surrounded by mountains of mineral waste under which are buried both towns and memories. “The main protagonist of this place [is] not even the people or the landscape, but its ecosystem that extends far beyond its own physical and temporal frontiers or limits,” says director Molina Peiró.

In his feature debut, new graduate Felix Lange follows Eastern European lorry drivers on strike in Germany, their action prompted by anger at allegedly unpaid wages. The context is grim. Over 300,000 drivers from these countries work in the EU - and many are being viciously exploited. At first, some of the striking drivers were wary of Lange in their presence. “But then suddenly I met this very close group of 10 Georgians and they took me in…” he tells BDE.

In 1996, intrepid Swedish freelance journalist Erling Söderström was part of an expedition into the Amazon jungle with Brazilian ethnographer and social activist, Sydney Possuelo. They were trying to make “first contact” with the Korubo Indians. As we see in Nathan Grossman’s new feature doc, 30 years on the footage makes for highly uncomfortable viewing, with the encounter seeming both awkward and exploitative. “It shows what enormous risks there are in relationship to these contact events,” Grossman tells BDE. “It’s also why, today, these kind of situations should be avoided to the largest extent we can.”

After he read Joe Kane’s classic piece of travel journalism ‘Running The Amazon,’ about how, in the mid- 1980s, eleven intrepid Europeans set off on an epic journey by kayak across the entire length of the Amazon river, Polish director Rafał Skalski was immediately smitten. “When I read the book, I decided it was a great theme for documentary,” he tells BDE. “What intrigued me most was that the foreground was dominated by what was happening between the people [on the trip], the emotions, conflicts and relationships.”

Traces, which won the Doc Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026 and is now selected for Polish Comp at MDAG, addresses head-on the collective trauma suffered by survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), as perpetrated by the Russian military on Ukrainian women and men since 2014. "You see these women, you see their faces. They're not covered. They're not blurred. They're ready to talk. They're ready to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of truth,” co-director Kovalenko tells BDE.

In Freak Show, Lukasz Ronduda and Filip Pawlak work with a group of disabled performers as they prepare for a show at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. The idea was to explore different ways in which they could represent the disabled body on stage while reflecting on the pain and contradictions of disabled life. It is a work that forces audiences to confront their preconceptions and prejudices about disabled bodies. Pawlak discusses the film with BDE.

In her feature doc world-premiering in International Competition at DOK.fest Munich, Maria Wischnewski profiles Helene Weigel, the great German actress, theatre manager and matriarch, and partner of Bertolt Brecht. “It is a strikingly modern story which, despite all its ambivalence, is far ahead of today’s feminist debates. In a time when we desperately need role models, there is still much to learn from her,” Wischnewski tells BDE.

Early on, director Florian Heinzen-Ziob thought he would be traveling around the globe, meeting scientists at important institutions in different continents, in making his documentary about the climate crisis. But then he decided it would be a little perverse to roam so far so far afield when his subject was climate change. It made more sense, he eventually decided, to stay closer to home. “In Germany, it was much more easy because I could just do everything by train,” he tells BDE.

At Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG, May 8-17), pitching does not only mean introducing projects in development. With Pole Position, the Warsaw-based festival has created a format designed for completed Polish documentaries already selected for its programme, giving producers the opportunity to present the completed works to international festival programmers, sales agents, distributors and broadcasters. BDE reports.

“We don’t separate cinematic quality from impact,” DocsBarcelona’s Èric Motjer tells BDE before doors open on the festival’s 29th edition. “We value both. We look for films that connect with the world we live in and that have cinematic value. I would say that giving value to the collective cinematic experience is central to how we think about the programme.” The festival runs May 7 to 17. Motjer is joined in interview by co-Artistic Director Maria Colomer.