Interviews

Migrant workers from North Macedonia may have profited greatly from their recruitment by the US to work in military bases across Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades. But building vast palaces and driving high-end cars will never erase the trauma of war that they still suffer from. Director Anabela Angelovska, German by birth but the daughter of a North Macedonian father, explains her film, selected for Documentary Competition, to BDE.

The Italian-based but Sarajevo-born Srdan Perkic can’t hide his pride that, at this relatively advanced stage of his life, he has finally made a movie. In his 50s, Perkic has belatedly completed his debut feature film, the documentary Lights Of Sarajevo, which is a world premiere in the Sarajevo Festival Documentary Competition this week. The late debutant talks to Business Doc Europe.

Young Ukrainian filmmaker Marta Smerechynska, whose new feature doc is selected for Sarajevo Doc Competition, is the daughter of a priest and the sister of a nun. “From early childhood, I was observing nuns. This phenomenon was very interesting and strange for me. I question myself a lot why they were choosing this way [of life],” she tells Business Doc Europe. “As a child, I even had a fear that maybe it is my vocation too.”

In October 2013, Anikó and Laci, a poor, middle-aged Hungarian couple struck it rich on the lottery. Their story is told in Mátyás Kálmán’s new film, Paying A Visit To Fortuna (screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition). As the director tells BDE, he was welcomed into their lives as, unlike almost everyone else they met, he didn’t want a hand-out and nor did he wish offer advice on how they should use their new-found wealth.

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.