Interviews

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.

The prolific Dutch docmaking couple discuss their latest film, shot during lockdown and very close to home. “We had always wondered what it would be like to make a film…in the garden,” says co-director Petra. “We couldn’t stand the idea that we wouldn’t have work during the Covid period.”

Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering’s part-archive doc seeks to unravel the mystery of Shangri-La, the mystical land written about so evocatively by British author James Hilton in his 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon.’ But it was only in 2001 that the place officially existed, after much investment and a very inventive marketing campaign, explains co-director Mirka Duijn.

Icelandic director Rut Sigurðardóttir tells BDE about her feature doc debut Skuld and her overall approach to non-fiction filmmaking. “I always believed that I wanted to tell other people’s stories...but very soon I realised that, of course, I’m always telling my own personal story, exploring my personal identity and role in this crazy world. [It’s] so obvious when you think about it... my covert narcissism disguised as altruism!”

One pitch warmly received in the IDFA Forum this week was for Motherland [working title], the new documentary by Danish directors Kristoffer Juel and Christian Als. As Juel explains to Business Doc Europe, the idea for the project dates back to 2015 when he and Als, who are photojournalists, had gone to Mongolia to film the Neo-Nazi gangs then thriving there.