Interviews

Dutch filmmaker Kasper Verkaik’s new film tells the story of US journalist Alec Shimkin who went missing in action in Vietnam just as he was threatening to lift the lid on the US Operation Speedy Express atrocity of 1968/69, which had an estimated body count of over 30,000, many thousands of them unarmed Vietnamese civilians. In researching Shimkin, Verkaik realised “there was so much more to find out about the Speedy Express story,” and that the journalist’s scoop “was way bigger” than even the journalist himself had known.

Director Eva Strating discusses her new documentary, co-directed with Roxanne Herder, both about Dutch women who are coerced into forced marriages by their own families, and the human rights activist Shirin Musa who is tirelessly working in their interests. The directors had, of course, heard about arranged marriages, “but we never knew that it's still actually something that takes place here, among girls born and raised in The Netherlands,” stresses Strating.

The 48th edition of the Paris-based festival and market kicks off March 21. "It is interesting how ParisDOC now covers the full spectrum of documentary filmmaking, from early writing stages to near-completion, and through to questions of circulation and heritage,” enthuses Anaïs Desrieux of the festival’s professional component. “This creates a coherent ecosystem and reinforces our role in supporting the valorisation of documentary cinema in all its forms.”

In Oscar-nominated Sara Dosa’s new feature doc, produced by National Geographic, renowned Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his film archives into a time capsule to hold onto the memory both of his country’s diminishing glaciers and his beloved grandparents. “I think for me, both as a person and a filmmaker, I'm endlessly inspired by the power of nature, and how humans can co-create story and meaning with nature,” Dosa tells Business Doc Europe.

Movies That Matter, the Hague-based festival for works exploring human rights and social issues, opens March 20 with American Doctor by Poh Si Teng, which world-premiered at Sundance. MTM has its share of world premieres, but Artistic Director Margje de Koning is less worried about having films first than other festivals. “For Movies That Matter, it’s nice to have premieres but it’s not our main requirement. Our philosophy is very much about the impact of the film.”

When thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters were washed up on beaches in the North East of England, director Jeanie Finlay quickly realised she had stumbled on an extraordinary but very grim story about the wanton destruction of marine life and the knock-on effect on fishing communities. Her new documentary, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, investigates the event. What’s more, it will be released by Glimmerama, the recently announced distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the production company owned by Finlay, who explains more to BDE.

Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche sat down with BDE to discuss her audacious directorial debut In-I In Motion, which records how, in the radical theatrical piece In-I (2007), she set out to dismantle the boundaries between movement and acting, together with acclaimed British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan. At the same time the pair explored the complexities of love and lust, devotion and jealousy, separation and reconciliation.

Tom Adjibi’s slyly subversive debut feature This Is Not A French Film [screening this week in NEXT:WAVE competition at CPH:DOX] exposes the bias and racism that non-white actors and artists still continually face in their careers. The director plays a version of himself - Tom, an actor so exasperated at being typecast that he decides to make a movie about it. “I have convictions, I have anger but sometimes my character is a little bit lost,” he describes to BDE the version of Tom we see in the movie.

As British-Romanian Rachel Taparjan follows Mihaela on her return to Romania in search of her birth mother, she finds herself drawn into the unresolved shadows of her own past. For her feature doc Something Familiar, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, the act of shaping the narrative allowed Taparjan to reclaim agency over events that once felt overwhelming. “It gave me a sense of control, a sense of authorship, and ultimately a sense of empowerment,” she tells BDE. “And it gave me beauty and poetry even in very dark chapters of my life.”

Matter Of Britain is a full-scale Arthurian epic - but one made in a tiny Sussex village. Peter Treherne’s film (which has just screened at CPH:DOX following its world premiere at MOMA in New York) features present-day residents of Mayfield playing characters from Thomas Malory’s 15th century classic Le Morte d’Arthur. “The idea is that if you get everybody to come together in a performative activity, people aren’t being objectified or observed in their intimate everyday,” the director tells BDE. “To some extent it is sort of ridiculous - and people love the idea of getting into chainmail.”