Interviews

“Being dead is BOOM,” says one kid in Sara van Oostrum’s very touching short doc about death, receiving its international premiere at IDFA. Another kid opines how, “when you’re dead you don’t fart anymore, and your heart stops beating.” Other children reflect on their very painful experiences of the passing of grandparents, and some older participants talk movingly about their late partners. The director tells BDE why she made her new doc.

Dutch Nirit Peled discusses her new doc, world premiering at IDFA, about the nightmare situation suffered by mothers whose sons are placed on the crime prevention lists drawn up by the authorities. “Intuitively, I felt there was something very interesting and very filmic in looking through parental eyes at youth criminality,” the director says.

There can be few documentaries that make their point as succinctly, or indeed as persuasively, as Sarah Vos’ White Balls on Walls, world-premiering November 11 at IDFA. It is a film very much of the time in which we are living, that tackles head on the subject of ethnic and gender diversity, or rather the lack of it, both within the board room and within the culture we consume.

“It's about diversity, inclusion and making sure that people find the way to connect to their audiences and articulate their very personal artistic voices,” Industry Head Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen explains to BDE of the offer to professionals on the eve of IDFA 2022. “We really want to be influential when it comes to exploring new ways of storytelling.”

Lea Glob first met Apolonia Sokol in 2009 – when Glob was a film student in Copenhagen and Sokol was a bohemian art student in Paris. Sokol’s life journey has taken tumultuous twists and turns in those intervening 13 years – she is now an internationally award-winning painter – and Glob has been there to document every step of the way, she explains to BDE.

Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden discusses her affectionate portrait of a favoured aunt who, during her final years, succumbed little by little to dementia. The portrait is funny, touching and very personal. At one point, when tasting a delicious morsel Ria remarks how it is “even better than an orgasm,” a phrase that the director claims her aunt was happy to resort to even when having her toe nails clipped.

Dutch/Croatian director Biserka Šuran discusses her new documentary which examines her Balkan roots, and those of her Croatian father, a man who feels he is “floating” between two cultures since emigrating to the Netherlands after the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia. The film world premieres at IDFA 2022.

“I don’t know why but we are obsessed with ethnicity here.” With her new doc All You See, produced by mint film office and world premiering as IDFA opening film, director Niki Padidar hopes to make Dutch audiences aware of the way they look at newcomers, and how their preconceptions can affect others often without them even realising it.

The Polish director talks to Business Doc Europe about her feature documentary which world premieres at IDFA 2022. Produced by Esther van Messel, the film follows Antek, a very conservative, very Catholic young man whose personal world is defined by both nationalism and celibacy. But little by little, he becomes curious about the outer world, and especially about the women in it…

After chancing upon Winslow, Arizona – during a long drive he needed a place to sleep for the night – veteran Danish doccer Jon Bang Carlsen ended up falling in love with the place, and decided to set his latest doc there, about teenagers exploring the idea of freedom. “They all have some kind of scars,” the director says of his young cast. “Those scars can either bring them down or could make them wiser and more prepared to go on in life.”