Interviews

When she was preparing her documentary Fire Of Love (an international premiere in DOX:AWARD and Visions du Réel opening film), Sara Dosa took inspiration from François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim, she tells BDE. Her film is also about a love triangle, the passion French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft felt for each other - and their romantic obsession with volcanoes themselves.

Director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and producer Helen Hood Scheer pitched their feature doc project Body Parts, now fully financed and recently selected for an as-yet unnamed US ‘A’ fest. The film explores the making of American ‘sex’ scenes, and assesses the toll on those involved. What if women speak up, shed light, and demand an entertainment industry that takes its responsibility to heart, the filmmakers ask.

In Sportscast 2, a Swedish football match offers director Sara Sjölin the perfect vehicle to commentate on the demise of her break-up with her boyfriend. The two teams were arch and bitter rivals. This, therefore, seemed the perfect match through which she could explore her relationship with him, she tells Business Doc Europe.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a towering figure in contemporary music. A genius, but one with a headstrong and flawed personality. As well as telling the story of 2019 staging of his magnum opus Licht, Dutch director Oeke Hoegendijk also offers an intimate and revealing portrait of Stockhausen himself, from the point of view of his wives, former lovers, children and collaborators. She explains more to BDE.

In his heartwarming film competing for Nordic:Dox Award, director Einari Paakkanen introduces us to a cast of Finns for whom karaoke is more than mere entertainment, rather a support mechanism that alleviates, at least temporarily, personal tragedies, problems and concerns. What’s more, the director explains to BDE, it is a particularly ubiquitous form of expression. “It's huge. You can go to any small town in Finland and there's two things you'll find - the alcohol shop and the karaoke place.”

In Emilie Beck’s debut feature doc, screening in Nordic:Dox, a young woman, Priyangika, who was adopted at a young age, embarks on an existential odyssey to her birth country of Sri Lanka to discover her own story. “I knew that whatever she [Priyangika] found during the journey, I wanted to follow her emotions, her existential travel...[but] the further we went, the bigger the story got,” director Beck tells BDE.

It may be framed by images of the total eclipses of 1961 and 1999 which were observable in her former country of Serbia, but Nataša Urban’s DOX:Award documentary is not a study of astronomical phenomena. Far from it. Rather, the film comprises a heartfelt mea culpa for Serbian atrocities inflicted during the Balkan wars. “My homeland […] put me through hell, and much worse, had done unconceivable atrocities, genocide even, in neighbouring countries,” says Urban.   

Swedish director Marcus Lindeen talks to Business Doc Europe about his short film Dear Dancer (international premiere), made in response to an interpretative dance event in Stockholm which was denied an audience because of lockdown, but which acclaimed choreographer Deborah Hay was determined should go ahead.

TV dramas have long perpetuated the stereotype of Naples as a Mecca for gangsters. In her Dox:Award Competition film, director Victoria Fiore wanted to show another side of the city, and so follows the Neopolitan kids, especially the lovable but mischievous Entoni. “Entoni’s story just shone through,” the director tells BDE. “I fell in love with his energy. He had so much of it. We got along straight away.”

Institute of Documentary Film Programme Director Zdeněk Blaha tells Business Doc Europe about East Doc Platform (25 March - 1 April) which welcomes projects and filmmakers from Ukraine as well as the rest of the region, and hosts nearly 400 international guests eager to explore new documentary output from Central and Eastern Europe. In total 46 projects are up for grabs this year (three from Ukraine), accompanied by a varied public and professional programme of events.