Interviews

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.

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.