Interviews

Nadia Nadim is both a force of nature and an inspiration. A woman who, after escaping Afghanistan as a young girl with her mother and sisters, became one of the world’s greatest footballers, playing for Paris Saint Germain and her adopted country of Denmark. And then she qualified as a surgeon! But she longs to return home to Kabul, if only to find the medals of her father, an army general murdered by the Taliban. Director Anissa Bonnefont discusses the appeal of Nadia.

In A Parked Life, the 52-minute version of which screens in International Competition at AJB Doc, Belgian director Peter Triest clocks up the kilometres on the motorways of Europe with Bulgarian long distance lorry driver Petar. Petar’s hardships are not merely economic. The long periods of absence have put a severe strain on his relationship with his wife back home, and the young son he hardly knows. Director Triest also gets behind the wheel with BDE.

Oddly, the legendary Jean-Luc Godard has been the subject of relatively few documentaries. But like buses, two have come along in 2022. Earlier this year we saw Mitra Farahani’s playful See You Friday Robinson, centered around a conversation between Godard and Ebrahim Golestan. Now, Cyril Leuthy's Godard Seul Le Cinéma is selected for Venice Classics. Director Leuthy talks to BDE.

The old cliché has it that two things in life you can’t avoid are death and taxes. In Israel, you can add military service to the list. Oscar-nominated Guy Davidi’s new feature documentary Innocence, sold by Autlook and which has been screening in competition in Orizzonti, looks at the human toll this policy takes. He explains more to BDE.

On the remote Greek island of Arki one child remains, 10-year old Kristos, the only pupil of teacher Maria. Will Kristos stay on the island to become a shepherd like his brothers, which is the wish of his father, or will he leave to continue his education far away on the other side of the Aegean sea? The filmmaker discusses her film, which world premieres in Giornate degli Autori, with BDE.

UK filmmaker Adrian Sibley profiles the late and (very) great Irish actor in 'The Ghost of Richard Harris', screening in Venice Classics. The director first met up with Harris the year before he died in 2002. “Everybody says that their film is long in gestation, and that it has taken forever. With this one, it really did,” Sibley tells Business Doc Europe.

Sergei Loznitsa discusses his new archive-based documentary about the trial, in 1946, of fifteen Nazis and their collaborators, accused of war crimes committed during WW2 in Ukraine. “On the one hand, of course, they are all criminals. The crimes they committed are absolutely terrible and inhumane. On the other hand, they are human beings. It is terrible to think they made such terrible choices in their lives that drew them to this complete degradation and destruction.”

Casa Susanna tells the intriguing and deeply moving story of a house in the Catskills region of New York that was used in the 1950s and ‘60s as a refuge for an underground network for transgender women and cross-dressing men. “The story of a clandestine community is there for all to see. With it, a fragment of queer history, stretching from the McCarthy era to the 1970s, is revealed,” explains director Lifshitz.

Screening Out of Competition in Venice, Steve James’ new documentary tells the remarkable story of the US spy Ted Hall who, in the 1940s, passed over secrets about the atomic bomb. “He did it for the right reasons. He didn’t do it because he wanted the Soviet Union to dominate the world. He did it because he was worried about what the US was capable of,” James tells Business Doc Europe.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature, premiering in Venice Classics. She talks to BDE.