Interviews

When a former US Marine plots a terrorist attack on a small-town American mosque, he undergoes a radical change when he comes face-to-face with the Muslins he had set out to kill. He is literally disarmed by their kindness. Stranger At The Gate is the latest in a long series of short films Joshua Seftel has made about Muslims in the US, post-9/11. “I felt maybe I could do something with my filmmaking to counter this hatred that Muslims were facing,” he tells BDE.

A change in Californian law allowed Eli Timoner to end his own life. The founder of Air Florida was in his early 90s, paralysed and in pain. He wanted to die on his own terms. His daughter, documentary maker Ondi Timoner, recorded his final 15 days in her new documentary, Last Flight Home (released in the US by MTV Documentary Films). “I thought I have to film him, I have to interview him…I have to record his final moments on earth,” she tells BDE.

My Name Is Happy tells the story of Kurdish aspiring singer Mutlu who, on the verge of stardom, suffers a terrifying and life-changing attack by a deranged suitor. Five years later, her carer & beloved sister Dilek is killed by her boyfriend. Despite her injuries Mutlu, now a huge TikTok star and ardent campaigner against femicide, pursues justice for her sister, supported by her ever-present family. Filmmakers Nick Read and Ayse Toprak discuss their feature documentary with Business Doc Europe.       

Hidden Letters may ostensibly be about Nushu, an old secret Chinese language used by women to communicate among themselves in periods of patriarchal oppression when they were prevented from reading and writing. Its real subject, however, is the situation of women in China today, co-director Violet Du Feng tells BDE. “It’s a film about them…about the challenges they are facing.”

In Dutch filmmaker Eliane Esther Bots’ multi award-winning short doc, interpreters from the Balkan region must apply the same level of neutrality and detachment to the evidence and testimonies they hear at the Yugoslavia Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, whether it be from victims or those suspected/accused of perpetrating war crimes. The film is submitted in the Academy Awards Short Doc category and nominated at the upcoming IDA Documentary Awards.

The story of the Janes collective, a secret network which operated in Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s to provide abortions, is told in a hard-hitting new HBO-backed documentary from Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. It is a film that seems all the more topical given the US Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe vs Wade. “We were hoping the film would speak to a past history but it turns out it speaks to a very present grim reality,” says Lessin.

Last week, IDFA hosted a conversation with Indian film director and producer Nishtha Jain, moderated by Pamela Cohn. Jain was also world-premiering her latest doc, The Golden Thread, at the Amsterdam docfest. The picture is set in India and focuses on the mill workers’ fight for a minimum monthly wage (equivalent to 250 USD) and their laborious work, which has hardly changed since the times of the industrial revolution.

When a well-meaning western non-profit GiveDirectly became the benefactors of Kogutu, a village in Kenya, paying every adult inhabitant with $22 a month, matters didn’t turn out quite as the western agency had hoped. Sold by Dogwoof, the film had its European premiere IDFA Frontlight section. Directors Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko talk hard cash with BDE.

Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez may have been born in Moscow but she describes herself as a Costa Rican, Chilean, Iraqi filmmaker. In her IDFA Award-winning film she uses personal archival artefacts to construct both a loving portrait of her exiled father, theatre director Mohsen Sadoon Yasin, and an elegy for the homeland of Iraq to which they can never return. “This film especially I dedicate to Iraq…but also to Chile,” Ishtar says.

At IDFA 2022, Amsterdam’s Royal Theatre Carré hosted a 90-minute conversation with Golden Lion, Academy Award-winning director Laura Poitras (Flag Wars, Citizenfour, The Oath, My Country My Country, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), moderated by IDFA’s artistic director, Orwa Nyrabia.