Interviews

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.

Anne is a very strong swimmer who can hold her breath for three minutes and 40 seconds. When she is underwater, she feels happy and in control of her environment. But Anne also has Asperger’s Syndrome, and in everyday life, noise and commotion upset and distract her. She is the subject of Under The Surface, the feature work-in-progress by Guido Verelst, who talks to BDE.

Producer Hans Everaert of Menuetto Film discusses Manu Riche’s Carbon, a film about the influence of carbon fuel over the last 100 years of history in Europe and the Middle East. The film is based around three trips, to Italy and Iraq, and the third to Ukraine where Riche originally planned to film in coal mines and to talk about wars that have been fought over carbon. But then war intervened for real…

Irène is over 100 and will die one day soon. When that happens, what will become of her daughter Yvette, who is in her 60s and has a mental disability? This is the key question asked by Ellen Pollard’s film, co-directed with Marie De Hert and which is a Work in Progress project at the Antwerp-based CONNEXT platform. Pollard discusses the work with Business Doc Europe.

Documentaries feature very prominently in this year’s hybrid edition of CONNEXT, the annual showcase for features and TV series made in Flanders and Brussels. As far as Flanders Audiovisual Fund Koen Van Bockstal is concerned, that is exactly as it should be. ““In documentaries, you give a voice to authors who can actually give their vision, their interpretation and their concerns about what is happening in the world.”