Interviews

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.

Holding Moses, shortlisted for the Short Documentary Oscar, is a deeply personal project for filmmaker Rivkah Beth Medow, she explains to Business Doc Europe. It follows Medow’s partner, dancer Randi Rader, as she learns to live with her young son’s severe disability. Medow directed the film alongside Jen Rainin with whom she founded Frankly Speaking Films.

When the polar bears turn up every year in the Canadian town of Churchill, Manitoba, so do the tourists, thousands of them, and a lot of news crews besides. Oh, and filmmakers too. Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden explain to BDE why their Oscar short-listed 14-minute doc will give audiences paws for thought. “Something I've taken away from this project is that if you place the camera at the right spot at the right time, the film will always reveal itself,” says Weisman.

It may be framed by images of the total eclipses of 1961 and 1999 which were observable in her former country of Serbia, but Nataša Urban’s documentary is not a study of astronomical phenomena. Far from it. Rather, the film comprises a heartfelt mea culpa for Serbian atrocities inflicted during the Balkan wars. “My homeland […] put me through hell, and, much worse, had done unconceivable atrocities, genocide even, in neighbouring countries,” Urban tells Business Doc Europe. 

Ben Proudfoot (whose Queen Of Basketball won the Oscar for Short Doc in 2022) has two more shorts in contention for 2023. Mink! concerns Japanese-American politician Patsy Mink who was behind the groundbreaking legislation which banned sex discrimination in education programmes, while The Best Chef In The World is about pioneering Californian chef, Sally Schmitt, founder of the revered restaurant, The French Laundry.