Interviews

Filmmaker Frederique De Montblanc talks to Business Doc Europe about her study of high-powered women in industry, the dilemmas they face and the hurdles De Montblanc herself had to overcome to make her film. “It was hard to tell [the banks] that I wanted to do a series of intimate portraits of women. They don’t get that. In some cases, I had to cancel shootings because in some cases the banks weren’t helping at all. Actually, they were working against us.”

Screening in Dutch Movies Matter Competition, Dutch filmmaker Marieke van der Winden’s Keep Silent (Het Grote Verzwijgen) comprises a deep dive into a family history that reveals the extent of Nazi collaboration and the continuing taboo the family members must deal with. “What really was helping me during the process, and was also a motivation to make the film, was getting to know my mother better,” the director tells BDE.

The stereotype of the climate activist is of an Extinction Rebellion-style protester, dressed like an old hippy, holding up the traffic in a busy city centre or blockading the petrol pumps. Roger Cox, the protagonist of Nic Balthazar’s new film Duty Of Care, screening in MTM Camera Justitia Competition, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.

Pulitzer Prize nominated US novelist Marianne Wiggins is the subject of the new doc world-premiering this week in the International Medium/Short competition in Nyon. This, though, isn’t the typical biographical portrait of an important writer. It’s more of a story about creativity in the face of illness; an intimate study of an artist trying to recover her full faculties after a devastating personal setback. Co-director Ressler talks to BDE.

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.