Interviews

Submitted for consideration in the Academy Awards Feature Doc category, Master of Light tells the incredible and vital story of George Anthony Morton who, having spent eleven years in federal prison for dealing drugs, now paints like a latter-day Rembrandt after honing his artistic skills while incarcerated. Director Rosa Ruth Boesten and producers Ilja Roomans and Anousha Nzume discuss their feature doc.

In her new film Those Who Dance In The Dark which screened in Ji.hlava’s Czech Joy Competition (as well as winning the Best Documentary Feature at the Warsaw Festival), Czech filmmaker Jana Ševčíková looks at the lives of young blind people. As the director acknowledges to BDE, however, her first idea was to make the film about their guide dogs.

On 28 October, the Ex Oriente Film workshop, organized by the Institute of Documentary Film at Ji.hlava IDFF, hosted a masterclass by award-winning Czech director, script editor and FAMU lecturer Lucie Kralová. During her talk, the helmer focused on her latest documentary feature, titled ‘Kapr Code’ and revolving around the progressive Prague-born composer and prominent communist activist Jan Kapr (1914–1988).

Czech Hana Blaha Šilarová talked to Business Doc Europe ahead of her presentation at Emerging Producers, a training programme designed for 17 up-and-coming European doc producers. Spanning Ji.hlava and Berlinale 2023, the programme will also introduce each to the international film market, and enable them to create a new network of film professionals “to increase the potential of European co-productions.”

It’s 44 years now since American preacher Jim Jones presided over the notorious mass-murder/suicide in which over 900 people died, most by taking poison, in a settlement in Guyana. Now, Czech director Jan Bušta has used the 1978 Jonestown massacre as the starting point for his radical new documentary, world premiering in Jihlava. The director explains talks to BDE.

Czech filmmaker Victor Portel tells Business Doc Europe about his new doc, screening in International and Czech Joy competitions, concerning Vladimir Dzuro, an ex-Prague detective turned International Criminal Tribunal investigator, whose painstaking research led to the arrest of a notorious war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.

US performance artist, writer and filmmaker Andrea Kleine talks to Business Doc Europe about her film in which she performs to an empty theatre, the same one she and her partner Bobby Previte holed up in during quarantine. “That was the crux of the film. How do you recreate that feeling of ‘live’ when nobody is there?” she muses.

In his film selected for International Competition, Mateo Ybarra returns to familiar ground as he examines Swiss army conscripts recording their drills and exercises, as well as their reflections on mandatory military service. “Far from being convinced by the relevance of such an institution and its functioning, the intertwining of civil and military society is…fascinating to me,” Ybarra tells BDE.

When Dr Adelheid Heftberger spoke to Business Doc Europe, it was just a few hours after her keynote speech last week at Leipzig’s DOK Archive market. “I wanted to explain a little bit the position of film archive in terms of access, and what happens in the background,” Heftberger [Head of Film Access, film dept of the German Bundesarchiv in Berlin] said of her address to the professional audience.

With over 1,300 film professionals in attendance every year, Ji.hlava IDFF is a key meeting place for the world doc industry, and the most important documentary hub in Central and Eastern Europe, even for US doccers. Head of Industry Jarmila Outratová guides Business Doc Europe though a programme jam-packed with new projects, the promotion of new production talent and a major market for CEE documentary output.