Interviews

The May 21 Scandinavian Showcase is one of eight country/regional presentations of soon to be finalised docs-in-progress, presented at Cannes Docs. The showcases are primarily designed for decision makers looking for new titles, in particular festival programmers and sales agents. In some cases the projects are also looking for post-production funding or general gap financing, and some are still open to co-production opportunities.

Hot Docs award-winning producer Johannes Schubert (Austria) outlines to BDE his plans for the 2022 EFP programme and explains his fascination both for the doc form and its practitioners. "Documentary filmmakers are incredibly kind and open-minded people. They are ambassadors for a better world and are courageous. I am longing for collaboration with them, and together we always try to challenge the status quo."

It’s a mind boggling number. China, as Gary Lennon’s new film Piano Dreams reveals, has 40 million piano students. They practise for 10 hours a day or more - and they nearly all dream of emulating the success of China’s global superstar, Lang Lang. The director duets with Business Doc Europe about the new doc, sold by MetFilm Sales and a market premiere in Cannes.

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa discusses his latest documentary, about the little attention paid to the suffering of Germans after the 2WW carpet bombing of cities such as Dresden. It is a film with much contemporary resonance, as it is selected for Cannes even as the war continues to rage in Ukraine.

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.