Interviews

As if the Balkans needs another country, and another set of borders... Meet Czech businessman and self-proclaimed ‘president’ Vít Jedlička who, in 2015, founded the ‘sovereign state’ of Liberland on an island on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia. In Isabella Rinaldi’s documentary, screening in VdR Medium/Short Competition, we also meet a happy Dutchman who has fully bought into the Liberland concept and two Tito-loving idealists who are dedicated to re-establishing a mini Yugoslavian state.

Dutch co-producer Janneke van de Kerkhof of Submarine explains why the company boarded Chinese filmmaker Lei Lei’s highly expressive animation documentary, supported by the Hubert Bals Fund, pitched at CineMart 2017 and selected for Visions du Réel Latitudes. The film which tells the life of the director’s family during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. Van de Kerkhof spoke before film’s world premiere at IFFR.

Director Daniel Kemény tells Business Doc Europe about his Swiss Competition film Supertempo, shot in Rome in the early days of the pandemic, and featuring himself and his girlfriend. “We were three in there, Laura, me and the camera. The camera was always with us,” Kemény remembers of the tripartite relationship during lockdown.

Still not even 30 years old, Czech Adam Ondra is considered one of the greatest climbers who ever lived. In their feature doc world-premiering in VdR Grand Angle, fellow countrymen Jan Šimánek & Petr Záruba follow him over the course of three years, both in his private life and up in the mountains, as he prepares for the 2020 Olympics. The pair discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Director Beckermann advertised a casting call for a film based on a notorious Viennese pornographic novel from 1906. Her subsequent doc sees 75 men confronted with excerpts from the book. “I made the film also as a kind of test. How will people - the public and society - react to it? Where do we stand today? Is it possible today to show such a film, or will there be wokeness against it?” she asks BDE.

If you haven’t heard of Czech composer Jan Kapr, that’s not a surprise. Kapr (1914-1988) was once one of the most prominent musical figures in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia but he fell spectacularly from grace after speaking out against the Russians in the wake of the 1968 Prague Spring. Czech filmmaker Lucie Králová explains her Burning Lights Competition documentary to BDE.

Elizabeth: A Portrait In Parts, a Special Screening at Visions Du Réel, may seem an uncharacteristic project for the late Roger Michell, director of the romcom Notting Hill. It’s an entirely archive-based documentary looking at the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II. However, as its producer Kevin Loader points out to BDE, it has many of the same qualities as his feature films.

When director Peter Entell’s father was 75, he sent his son a letter suggesting he should make a film about old people. “It’s fun to be old,” was one possible title his father suggested. Entell took his father at his word. The documentary he made, premiering in the Burning Lights competition at Visions Du Reel, doesn’t portray old age in quite the way the father first anticipated. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

In his feature doc No Place for You in Our Town (screening in Visions du Réel Latitudes and presenting at Movies That Matter, following its world premiere at CPH:DOX), Bulgarian director Nikolay Stefanov returns to his home town of Pernik to look at the lives of some of football club FC Minyor’s most die-hard supporters, who are part of a once-prospering, now struggling, mining community.

The Movies That Matter Industry programme gets into full swing April 7 after easing of restrictions on face to face engagement in The Netherlands, and following its initial online roll-out during lockdown. Industry manager Emma Romeijn tells Business Doc Europe what to expect over the coming days. “The red thread throughout our industry program is the idea of impact,” she underlines.