Interviews

Pepe Danquart discusses his new documentary, about the international acclaimed German artist Daniel Richte. “He has a great knowledge about painting, about the history of art. He knows a lot about politics. He reads regularly the newspapers. He has a certain approach to reality,” the director tells BDE of his subject’s intelligence and very wide frame of reference.

On 14 October, the Rome-based MIA market shone the spotlight on one of the most successful non-fiction hits of the year, the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler. The one-hour discussion, moderated by Joel Zimmer, President of AGC Unwritten at AGC Studios, saw the participation of director Felicity Morris.

The feature doc BOYZ, fully financed and ready for delivery at the beginning 2023, concerns three male friends on the cusp of adulthood reflecting on matters such as sexuality and masculinity. “When my little brother [a subject in the film] moved in with me, I saw how differently and how progressively they were tackling these questions, how they were able to openly talk about them,” director Cruiziat tells BDE.

Take three brilliant young female photographers living and working in the GDR in the 1980s. All are desperate for artistic freedom but all are running up against a brutal political system. And the Stasi secret police are harassing them and monitoring their every move. The artists in question are the subjects of Rebels, the world-premiering feature documentary of Pamela Meyer-Arndt, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

As British Pathé’s Simon Witter explains to Business Doc Europe on the eve of DOK Leipzig’s inaugural Archive Market, the sector continues to enjoy a boom time. “The year that just closed was the busiest we’ve ever had…We’re on a high at the moment,” he says.

In Corpus A Quest for Eternity, a collection of contemporary, internationally known artists take us on a journey into the world of medical art to reflect upon death and the beauty of the mortal body. “We use art - and the fragile human body as a metaphor - to ask existential questions, and investigate the subject of mortality through a poetic visual language,” write the filmmakers.

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.