Interviews

Much Ado About Dying is a documentary with very unlikely origins, British documentary maker Simon Chambers tells BDE. The original idea had been to make a movie called Carmageddon about traffic congestion and climate change in Delhi. Instead, Chambers left the traffic fumes in India far behind and ended up back in London, looking after his uncle David, whose health was failing.

London-based German filmmaker Eva Weber was never an Angela Merkel supporter, but she was always an admirer. “What I’ve really come to admire is her fact-based, pragmatic, reasoned, compromise-seeking approach that is so in contrast to the populist leaders of our world,” the director tells Business Doc Europe. Weber’s new film Merkel receives its European premiere at IDFA.

Khaled Jarrar’s documentary (a world premiere at IDFA) is a refugee story with a difference. The Palestinian artist and director joined a family fleeing the Syrian war on their nightmarish trip across Europe. He wasn’t a news reporter, exploiting their predicament for headlines. He was their friend, looking on at events with their eyes, sharing their hunger, cold and humiliation as well as their fury. He explains more to BDE.

Due to hit Netflix on 11 November and exec-produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, Elvis Mitchell’s whistle stop tour of Black US cinema is now being tipped as a potential Oscar contender. Originally conceived as a book, no publisher was interested. But Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen saw matters differently. “I don’t think that is a book,” McQueen said. “I think it is a documentary.”

As one of the characters puts it in The Hamlet Syndrome, it’s not about choice, it’s about responsibility. She is one of five actors who have returned from active military service on the Donbass frontline, even before the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, to perform in a play loosely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy. For them, the question of ‘to be or not to be’ has immeasurable poignancy and weight in existential terms, as the directors tell BDE.

The Armenian genocide has been explored in several films in recent years: in Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), Fatih Akin’s The Cut (2014) and Terry George’s The Promise (2016). Now, one of the most traumatic and bitterly contested episodes in early 20th Century history is revisited in Aurora’s Sunrise, the remarkable new documentary by Armenian director Inna Sahakyan, who talks to BDE.

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.”