Interviews

In his documentary selected for Locarno Semaine de la Critique, Swiss filmmaker Jan Baumgartner, whose primary line of work is nursing, tells an astonishing tale of hope, persistence and devotion as a team of international forensic scientists seek to identify, via DNA analysis, the missing victims of the Balkans War. Location by location, object by object, bone by bone. Baumgartner discusses his film with BDE.

Dutch filmmaker and visual artist Douwe Dijkstra discusses his short film Neighbour Abdi, selected for Pardi di Domani Competition at Locarno 2022, which deploys a freewheeling and visually engaging aesthetic in which the filmmaking process, and especially the creation of green screen special effects, is particularly fore-fronted.

The Swiss/Spanish project, comprising a portrait of four young people in the impoverished Extremadura region of South West Spain and set against a background of legal hare hunting, is presented at Locarno Pro 2022. “This story deals with universal issues at the local level, and attempts to connect primitive violence with modern technology communication,” say the filmmakers.

New York-based Erica Jong, who turned 80 earlier this year, has been a full blown literary celebrity for going on half a century. She has written many books, including the much-lauded and provocative ‘Fear of Flying,’ and has been a regular fixture on US talk shows. But nobody has made a proper documentary about her. Until now. Swiss filmmaker Kaspar Kasics talks to BDE about his new doc, playing Out of Competition in Locarno.

The esteemed Austrian docmaker talks to Business Doc Europe about his new film, selected for Concorso Internazionale, which tackles the global problem of trash and its disposal…or rather its relocation. As he points out in the starkest of terms, rubbish may be buried in landfill, recycled, burnt or dismantled - but it doesn’t vanish.

In their new film, world-premiering at Locarno, co-directors João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata pay tribute both to Paulo Rocha, a titan of Portuguese cinema, and his highly influential film from 1964, The Green Years. But while Rocha’s work is a piece of drama, Where Is This Street? is strictly documentary. It is also a personal portrait of the directors’ home city of Lisbon during the pandemic.

Sara Dosa’s tale of intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft opens July 29 across the UK, released by Dogwoof. As director Dosa told BDE earlier this year, in making the film she took inspiration from François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim. Her film is also about a love triangle, the passion French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft felt for each other – but also their romantic obsession with volcanoes.

Brazilian Bernardo Zanotta, who studied film at the prestigious Rietveld Academy, discusses his ‘long short film’ Insieme Insieme, which world premieres at FID Marseille. “I was deeply influenced by the nouvelle vague, and its typical gang of outsiders,” he says. “It is a trope that often returns throughout film history, and one which I wanted to explore.”

Dutch visual artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh discusses her short film Obsada, selected for FID Marseille. The film is made with an all-female film crew at the Łódź Film School in Poland who reflect on aspects of gender within the industry they have chosen.

Director Susanna White world-premiered her new documentary, about the literary lion TS Eliot, at the recent Sheffield DocFest. For her the film was a labour of love. “I think it made me realize he was far more emotional and sensitive than I'd ever understood,” she says of the man whose true motivations for the poem were revealed in 2020 after more than a thousand letters to a secret paramour were unveiled, sixty years after they were donated to Princeton University Library.