Interviews

The Polish feature documentary Closure tells the most desperate of personal stories, that of a dad searching for his lost son. “This film became one of the most challenging I’ve made on every level, because it required holding two impulses at once,” director Michał Marczak tells BDE. “On the one hand, I wanted to keep the crew minimal and intimate. On the other hand, I wanted the film to carry an epic scope, to convey emotion through images and atmosphere, through showing rather than telling.”

“I think there is no imperative for documentary films to change the world. But you can’t deny the fact that they do have an impact on our reality,” MDAG Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk tells BDE, as he reflects on the global crises that have formed a grim backdrop to all our lives over the past years. The 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity docfest opens May 7 across seven Polish cities - Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdynia, Poznan, Katowice, Lodz, Bydgoszcz - running 8 to 17 May 2026 in cinemas, before going online 19 May to 1 June.

DOKfest Munich boss Adele Kohout discusses her 2026 festival offer with BDE, at the same time reflecting on the heightened need for documentaries right now, and events such as hers to exhibit them. “The documentary is the best form of expression for our times,” she tells BDE. “I see the documentary as a magnifying glass, and its relevance is greater than ever. People have a need for the real, the authentic, especially when they…trust images less. And that is exactly what the documentary offers.” The festival runs May 6 to 18.

In her latest feature documentary, Giedrė Žickytė tells the dramatic story of the late Irena Veisaitė, fellow Lithuanian and academic, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist. “Irena genuinely cared about the ‘other’ and was truly interested in each person - perhaps this is why she was so beloved,” Žickytė tells BDE. “She knew how to show sincere attention and respect to everyone, no matter their position, status, nationality, religion. Another important thing was the human values she embodied, her wisdom, and the way she naturally became a moral authority.”

The feature documentary Dispatch - a prose poem to life and a paean to grief, longing and nostalgia - immerses us into the mind of Indian director Anu Vaidyanathan after the death of her much-loved mother-in-law, a mathematician from pre-Partition Punjab. “The making of it felt a bit like a fever dream,” the director tells BDE of her feature doc, which world-premiered at BAFICI (Buenos Aires). “I think the upside of grief is you have extreme clarity about what you don't want, and I did not want one more day, one more hour spent imagining a time when I would have a completed film.”

Tin Castle may have been presented as a Work-in-Progress in Nyon this week but audiences won’t have long to wait for the completed feature. The French-Irish co-production (previously titled A Road Less Travelled) will have its world premiere in Critics’ Week in Cannes next month. In the doc, director Alexander Murphy follows the O’Reillys, an Irish traveller family living in a fixed caravan. French producer Cosme Bongrain explains more…

My Skin And I, the new project from artists and filmmakers Milton Guillén and Fiona Guy Hall, is generating buzz even before its completion. It won two awards at VDR Industry this week after being presented in the works in progress section, and has already secured funding from both US and European sources. “The project really lives in this space where the political intersects with the personal and [looks at] how these two aspects of our lives are fundamentally intertwined,” Guy Hall tells BDE.

In Nyon, the producer/director team of Johnny Brewin and Laura Plancarte presented their project Boom!, the story of George and Sonia, a boxing couple in West London. The pair run a successful gym. They’ve got kids and are very much in love. They are also hyper competitive. “We are chasing the rush,” notes director Plancarte, who identifies closely with her subjects. “Obviously, I don’t put myself at risk like they do. But as an independent filmmaker, you need to do 10 roles yourself…and it is exhausting. Why do I choose this [as a career]? I am the same as them…I cannot think about everything else!”

In Edgar Hagen’s new film, The Roots Of Madness (screening in The National Competition at Visions Du Réel), the filmmaker accompanies the near-legendary German war reporter Ulrich Tilgner on a journey back to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond. “The special thing about him is that he always tried to understand the people, not only the politics,” Hagen observes of the journalist’s humanistic, ground-level approach to his work.

In his essay-style documentary, director G. Anthony Svatek uses the story of Alexander von Humboldt, once the world’s most famous scientist, as a way of exploring contemporary environmental issues. “I thought the strongest way to do that is in the form of a love letter from me to him, showing him what is left of his vision of an interconnected world and how technology has totally changed this idea of a holistic ecology that he proposed.”