Interviews

Agora Docs, the industry arm of the 24th Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, is set to run in-person March 11-19 with 250+ documentary toppers in attendance. Programme head Yianna Sarri fills in BDE on the event’s USPs, which include a market of 350 titles, a pitching forum, a works-in-progress session, a lab workshop and a focus on new Georgian talent, with overall emphasis placed on Mediterranean, Balkan and, of course, Greek documentary.

Love, Deutschmarks and Death…it sounds like the title of one of those acerbic Fassbinder melodramas of the 1970s. In fact, this is the name of the new feature documentary from director Cem Kaya about the Turkish music scene in Germany and which, last month, won the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award. Kaya gets musical with Business Doc Europe.

Following on from the 2019 doc Pictures From Afghanistan, director Robbie Fraser follows intrepid photojournalist, and fellow Scot, David Pratt into another war zone, this time Iraq. Yes, Iraq is a country riven by ethnic, tribal and religious divisions, but Fraser talks equally passionately to BDE of the country’s immense beauty and the kindness and hospitality of its people.

“I guess I have had a kind of meandering life. I haven’t really been able to follow the ABCD route through things,” Scottish filmmaker Lizzie MacKenzie tries to make sense to BDE of the somewhat random circumstances which eventually led to her making her feature documentary The Hermit of Treig, a world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival 2022.

For the second year running Ben Proudfoot is in the frame for Best Short Documentary Oscar following his nomination for The Queen of Basketball, about pioneering women’s basketball player Lusia “Lucy” Harris, the first female to score a basket in the Olympic Games, and one of the only women to be drafted into the NBA. The director talks hoop dreams with Business Doc Europe.

Twenty one docs are selected for Glasgow Film Festival (March 2-13), five of which have a particularly Caledonian flavour. “What we try and do is program without prejudice,” GFF co-director Allison Gardner tells Business Doc Europe. “It doesn't have to be a world premiere, it doesn't have to be a UK premiere. We try and look for great films that we know audiences will engage with and that applies across the whole program as well as the documentary strand.”

Filmmakers Jon Shenk and Pedro Kos talk to Business Doc Europe about their Netflix-backed short documentary Lead Me Home which deals with homelessness, and which has been nominated for an Oscar. “It’s difficult to change people’s minds until you touch people in the heart…we just wanted to remind people there is this incredible breadth of humanity out there that is suffering.”

Matt Ogens’ Oscar-nominated short film Audible is a coming-of-age story following teenage American football star, Amaree McKenstry-Hall, at the Maryland School for the Deaf. From the start, Ogens knew that he wanted to follow a senior from high school, about to “go out into the hearing world. It’s a really pivotal moment, going outside the bubble of your safe school,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Rory Kennedy’s new film, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, just released on Netflix, looks behind the two crashes of Boeing 737s. The first, in October 2018, was a Lion Air flight in Indonesia. All 189 people on board died. The second, in March 2019, was an Ethiopian Airlines flight taking off from Addis Ababa. Again, all 157 aboard died. Filmmaker Rory Kennedy discusses her film with BDE.

Young German docmaker Sarah Noa Bozenhardt has been at Berlin this week as part of the “Face To Face With German Films” event highlighting 7 up-and-coming young German talents. It was also an opportunity for Bozenhardt to talk up her recent film Among Us Women, which premiered in DOK Leipzig International Competition 2022. And as she reveals to BDE, she also grew up in the circus.