Interviews

Brussels-based producer Maarten Schmidt comes to European Film Promotion’s showcase for leading producers with four projects, two of which (The Last Frontier and Under the Surface) are feature docs, another of which (Exit Tales) is a 6 x 12-minute animated series based on the voice-recorded interviews of six child refugees. Schmidt talks the magic of documentary with Business Doc Europe.

Spanish director Ainara Vera tells Business Doc Europe about her dramatic and at times sumptuous new doc Polaris, selected for Cannes ACID, that tells of two French sisters whose lives are polar opposites: Hayat, the immensely capable skipper of a boat that traverses the freezing Arctic Sea between Iceland and Greenland, and her younger sister Leila, not long out of jail and soon to give birth to the baby Inaya.

In each of the past three years, Anna Berthollet of Lightdox has acquired a great new doc at Visions du Réel which was then selected for Cannes ACID. Over the same period her company Lightdox has been one of Cannes Docs’ featured exhibitors. Which makes it all the more surprising that Berthollet will be visiting the world’s leading film festival for the first time in 2022. A prospect she is relishing, she tells Business Doc Europe.

Filmmaker Markus Weinberg was once a professional cyclist. He remains very fit. If he wasn’t in such good trim himself, it’s hard to see how he could possibly have made his new film, Jonas Deichmann - The Limit Is Just Me, which has been screening this week in DOK.fest Munich. The director gets in the saddle with Business Doc Europe.

To passers-by on the Hamburg streets, they were simply beggars. Maybe you would give them a coin or two as you were rushing for a train or heading home after work but you wouldn’t think about them again. But as filmmaker Andrei Schwartz tells Business Doc Europe, they were fellow humans with compelling stories to tell.

Irish filmmaker Frankie Fenton discusses his new film Atomic Hope, world-premiering at Hot Docs. With climate change a continual peril to the planet, numerous countries are desperate to wean themselves off fossil fuels. New sources of clean energy are coveted yet environmental groups remain hugely suspicious about all forms of nuclear power as well. As Fenton tells BDE, the film plunges into what remains a very heated debate.

German filmmaker Erec Brehmer's Who We Will Have Been is a film about love and grief that many viewers are likely to find utterly heartbreaking. In the documentary, the director tries to come to terms with the death of his girlfriend Angelina Zeidler in a road accident. "This film for me was also a search for where I can meet Angie again now she is dead. I don't want to let go of her and I don't want to leave her behind in order to start a new life," the director tells BDE.

Burlesque artist Lula had endured tough times in Soviet-era Poland, not a welcoming environment for flamboyant drag queens. But he soon realised that the picture of him that director Bogna Kowalczyk was trying to paint was multi-layered, one touching on death, grief and growing old. That idea appealed to him. "I trust you, let's do it," he told the director, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

Matt Sarnecki’s captivating documentary, selected for Hot Docs International Competition, is more than the story of a murder, that of Slovakian investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. It’s also a “blueprint of how corruption works…[how] organised crime has worked hand in hand with law enforcement and other political leaders to corrupt a country,” Sarnecki tells BDE.

Selected for Hot Docs Changing Face of Europe, Band describes the existential dilemma faced by the three-woman 40-something Post Performance Blues Band who make a final push for fame and fortune within a pop industry that celebrates youth over talent. The film is very funny but, as Icelandic director Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir tells Business Doc Europe, this ain’t no mock doc. If you are imagining Spinal Tap, then think again.