Interviews

Flemish filmmaker Luc Vrydaghs profiles the late Jan Hoet, one of the most controversial European curators of recent decades, charting his personal evolution from insecurity as a young man towards de facto papal status within the modern art world. But at the very core of Hoet’s artistic sense was something altogether more classical, the titular Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, which resides in the Flemish town of Ghent.

The UK-based Imperial War Museums will be on the front line during DOK Leipzig’s Archive Market, representing a collection with 25,000 hours of moving images. “People think of us as a military collection but really our collection reflects life in the 20th and early 21st century,” Film Curator Fiona Kelly tells BDE. “We’re trying to get people to think of us a resource for social and cultural history as well as military history.”

You won’t find many bigger collections at DOK Leipzig Archive market than that of Sweden’s SVT Archives. It has over 400,000 hours of material in its vaults. Some of this is very recent. Some dates right back to the birth of cinema in 1896. Maria Bergmark talks Business Doc Europe through the SVT offer. “It’s not just from Sweden but from all over the world,” she says.

Elizabeth Klinck can justly be called one of the doyennes of the film archive world. She will be at DOK Leipzig for the inaugural edition of the DOK Archive Market, kicking off today, Oct 20, where she will also be chairing case studies and a masterclass. Before all that, she took time to expound on her life in the sector with BDE.  

At MIA 2022, the directing duo Samuel León and Saúl Valverde pitched Diary of an Infiltrator, a 4x45’ docuseries project set to be filmed between Chile, Rome, Berlin and Buenos Aires. The series revolves around the “incredible, untold story” of anarchist filmmaker Miguel Herberg who infiltrated Pinochet’s Chilean military regime from 1972 to 1974, exposing its murderous iniquities.

Directed and edited by Ilaria de Laurentiis, The Rossellini Method promises to be “an archive film portrait of the legendary Italian director: revolutionary, irreverent, contradictory, candid in life and art.” De Laurentiis edited the feature doc The Rossellinis, which was pitched at MIA 2019 and selected for Venice the following year. Producer Raffaele Brunetti talks to Business Doc Europe about his latest Rossellini doc.

What is the moral cost of the War on Terror? Is it legitimate to violate the law in the name of national security? These are the two main questions tackled in the new doc feature, fully titled Ghost Detainee – The Extraordinary Rendition of Abu Omar and pitched at this year’s MIA market. “It is a spy film but also a reflection on what limits our governments can push to defend their own democratic principles,” the Italian doccers tell BDE.

It’s not often in a doc that you encounter a cross-gender ornithologist (Sergei/Lydia) with an addiction to Twin Peaks (he/she has seen it 30 times) and a desperate need to create a life-size silicon replica of Lara Flynn Boyle, the series heroine. Throw into the mix an engaging elbow fetish and a director’s vain attempts to understand her subject and you have, in a nutshell, the latest film from Sasha Kulak, who talks to BDE.

The prolific Flemish doc producer Diplodokus attends CONNEXT with two series projects, the 4-part work-in-progress DNA, about the ongoing genetic revolution, and the completed 3-part series Catching the Pirate King which looks at how Belgian police became involved in the apprehension of leading Somalian pirates and helped put them on trial. Both series are co-directed by Maarten and Lennart Stuyck, who talks to BDE.

Award winning director, DoP and TV author Edoardo Anselmi and producer Carlo Ghiani last week pitched their new non-fiction project at Rome’s MIA, a TV one-off titled Banksy and The Sad Girl (La ragazza triste di Banksy). The film follows the rescue of the titular contemporary icon and promises to explore the impact of street art today.