Interviews

The exploration of Earth’s orbit takes centre stage in Blue Sphere, a science-fiction docuseries project pitched at the MIA market in Rome last week. Within an epic that follows space pioneers over several generations, director Jérôme Bernard will invite experts to discuss the human and technological challenges that arise from the conquest of the environment beyond our atmosphere.

Jazz and Cold War politics are intimately entwined in Flemish director Johan Grimonprez’s latest doc feature, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a work-in-progress at CONNEXT. The film explores the circumstances which led to musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach staging their own protest at the UN against the murder of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. The director talks to BDE.

Indian Kinshuk Surjan’s new project tells a story that is tragic and appalling on both personal and wider societal levels. The film concerns the hundreds of thousands of suicides by farmers in the Indian subcontinent which have resulted from legislation that has, effectively, made them economic slaves to large corporations. But as the director explained to Business Doc Europe, the widows left behind are fighting back…

The title says it all on Pieter Van Eecke’s new project. “There is no Plan B. There is no Planet B,” he explained to Business Doc Europe of his film about two teenage kids, Bo and Lina, who take up the fight against climate change. “I think the urgency with which we should act now is incredibly high. And I think it's also my task as a filmmaker.”

Flemish DJ and filmmaker Pascal Garnier remembers vividly the circumstances in which he first watched the Dutch-made 1986 music documentary Big Fun In The Big Town, which featured artists like Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and Run-DMC. As a teenager looking for his own “thing and identity,” he was strongly influenced by the film’s “direct and intimate view of what it was like in New York back then,” he tells BDE.

Aldine Reinink talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film, a profile of renowned Belgian photographer Herman Selleslags, whose vast Antwerp house teems with the ghosts of 20th Century pop culture, as captured by his camera. But the multiplicity of images also conceals two psychologically complex father-son relationships which have defined life in the Selleslags household, the director reveals.

The Nebulae project follows the journey of indigenous filmmaker Sueli Maxakali and her sister Maisa to Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil), in search of their father, the shaman Luis Kaiowá, from whom they were separated as children during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Co-director Roberto Romero discusses the project with Business Doc Europe.

Flemish producer Kristian Van der Heyden, who is also part of the Ji.hlava Emerging Producers programme in 2022, came to Antwerp to present his project about modern day slavery. “This is not about history. It is about an island in Indonesia where an overlooked traditional culture has kept alive this element of slavery for centuries until today,” he told the professional audience.

Fernando Sulichin has been working with Oliver Stone for going on 20 years. He has enabled Stone to make documentaries about some of the most colourful and contentious figures in contemporary world politics. One of their latest collaborations, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, screened in Doclisboa a few days ago, where BDE caught up with the Argentinean-born maverick.

The stereotype of the climate activist is of an Extinction Rebellion-style protester, dressed like an old hippy, holding up the traffic in a busy city centre or blockading the petrol pumps. Roger Cox, the protagonist of Nic Balthazar’s new film Duty Of Care, screening online at CONNEXT 2022, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.