Interviews

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.

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.”