Interviews

Intrepid British photographer/filmmaker/climber Jonathan Griffith won Best VR story at Cannes XR last month for his latest project, Alex Honnold: The Soloist. It’s an astonishingly realistic film in which viewers wearing their VR headsets accompany Honnold as he clambers up the sheerest rock faces high up in the Alps. The director invites BDE to join him.

The new doc A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, directed by Mark Cousins and produced by Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, is one of the most high profile projects presented at this week’s MeetMarket at Sheffield DocFest. “When you look inside her imagination, you encounter this kind of Leonardo Da Vinci untrammeled thing where science and art, left and right, all combine,” Cousins tells BDE of his subject, the late Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

BDE talks to producer Lorine Plagnol who will be in Sheffield this week taking part in MeetMarket with her company Sungazer’s latest project Dalton’s Dream. This is a feature doc about UK X Factor winner Dalton Harris. As a young, queer musical star from Jamaica, he is seeking love and acceptance in a world that isn’t always sympathetic toward him. The film, currently in post-production, is co-directed by Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown.

For many people bodybuilders are freaks, but to Hungarian director Anna Nemes they are beautiful living sculptures. In Beauty of the Beast, world-premiering at Sheffield DocFest, she accords to female bodybuilders the same seriousness as another director would to contemporary dancers, using every part of her filmmaking process to underline their inherent majesty and dignity. The director discusses her work with Business Doc Europe.

Monday 27 June sees the world premiere “cine-concert” of Esther Johnson’s bold and innovative new feature documentary Dust & Metal at Sheffield DocFest 2022. It’s a Vietnam story but don’t expect any of the clichés of apocalyptic western war movies set in the country. The focus here is on bikes, not guns. Johnson gets in tandem with Business Doc Europe.

A group of dogged cinephiles who meet every Monday night to socialise, drink cups tea and show their films are the heroes of Kim Hopkins’ new documentary A Bunch Of Amateurs, sold by MetFilms and receiving its world premiere in International Competition at Sheffield DocFest this week. The director sits down for a brew with Business Doc Europe.

Back in 2012 director Rodrigo Reyes was the California court interpreter at the trial of 19-year old Sansón, accused of murder. After being found guilty he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Reyes was always troubled by the trial. “I never got to hear his story,” he says. “Everything was focused on a single moment, on the incident that brought him to court, but not on who he was or where he came from.” The director therefore set out to tell the personal history of Sansón.

“Time,” director Barney Douglas tells Business Doc Europe when asked just how he managed to prise tennis star John McEnroe so far out of his shell in his revealing and intimate new feature documentary, McEnroe, receiving its international premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest in advance of its UK release next month.

Half a century before #MeToo, the revolutionary, iconoclastic, firebrand feminist Andrea Dworkin was calling out gender inequality and the pervasiveness of sexism. Dworkin was a woman whose political radicalism was shaped by the sexual and physical abuse she suffered, yet when alive she was applauded and derided in equal measure. In the feature doc selected for International Competition Pratibha Parmar reflects on one of the 20th Century’s most brilliant but polarizing figures.

Bob Rosenzweig is an abrasive, quick-witted Jewish New Yorker, devoted to his family. He loves to play the guitar drink a whisky and tell stories about his wild, carefree youth - how he went to Woodstock as a teenager and his encounters with famous rock stars. But Bob is also suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and has decided he wants to end his life, a process that Amiel Courtin-Wilson chronicles in his new film, selected for International Competition. Courtin-Wilson talks to BDE.