Interviews

If future generations want to know how the world’s scientific community responded to coronavirus, one of their first starting points is likely to be US director David France’s How To Survive A Pandemic, sold by Dogwoof. The film, screening in CPH: Science, tells the story of how scientists across the world raced to develop vaccines against a virus which has been killing millions. France explains his doc to BDE.

In late 2021, CPH:DOX 2022 seemed destined for digital roll-out a third year running. But to the relief of all, the Covid threat abated and Danish cinemas re-opened in January, which meant plans for a hybrid festival presentation of 200 new films, 76 world premieres and 6 international competitions comprising 59 titles could go ahead. Katrine Kiilgaard (MD of CPH PIX and BUSTER as well as CPH:DOX) explains her relief to BDE.

Finnish/UK filmmaker John Webster talks to Business Doc Europe about his film that exposes how corporate jargon, fashionable management practice and ‘self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency’ threaten to drain all sense of satisfaction from the work process. “If people have burn-out, it is not because of weakness and personal flaws but because they’ve just been subjected to a toxic working environment,” he says.

In 2015, Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed was shooting a promo video for a physical rehabilitation centre when he met Estrid, who was then just 12 years old. She was doing rehab after falling out a fifth-floor window four months beforehand, which left her with 17 fractures but remarkably no brain injury. The director discusses Estrid’s subsequent six-year odyssey with BDE.

This isn’t the first time that Danish filmmaker Mistrati has explored the dirty secrets of the chocolate industry. His previous films include The Dark Side Of Chocolate (2010) and Shady Chocolate (2012). “The price for a chocolate bar is unnaturally low. It doesn’t make any sense. A chocolate bar should cost around 4 or 5 quid, not 50p. It’s unrealistic…unless you don’t pay the farmer and the farmer’s employees,” the director tells BDE of his F:act Award Comp selection.

“I always dreamed about becoming an explorer,” Danish filmmaker Lars Ostenfeld tells Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 23 world premiere of CPH:DOX opener Into The Ice. “Every day we see something in the news about the ice melting, but we have no idea how fast it’s going,” says the director of what inspired his eco-doc. "Instead of just telling people something is wrong with the climate, I wanted to discover where do we get these numbers?”

CPH:DOX returns to cinemas April 23 after two online editions, opening with Into The Ice, a timely reminder of the dangers of the West’s continuing dependence on fossil fuels. “Now it seems that we finally understand that energy politics is security politics and that therefore we have to act fast…and this film shows we need to act even faster than we thought to save the climate,” says the festival’s Niklas Engstrøm.

The annual documentary forum DocedgeKolkata, which describes itself as an “incubation-cum-pitching” event for Indian and Asian filmmakers, is on an extraordinary run of success. One of the projects that the annual Indian event (which will be held virtually this year in March-May 2022) helped along the way in 2017, Writing With Fire from directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, has been nominated for the Feature Doc Oscar.

Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont opened up to Thessaloniki audiences yesterday after the International Competition screening of Sundance winner A House Made of Splinters, about a small group of strong-willed social workers on the Ukraine front line working tirelessly to create a magical refuge for kids. “I fight as much as I can, and with their stories, I give them a voice, which no one else will do,” Wilmont underlined of the film’s young subjects.

After working out a way to secure loans that the banks couldn’t trace, the Catalonian political activist Enric Duran became a folk hero, nicknamed ‘Robin Bank.’ Why did he do this? To expose the greed and corruption of the banking system. As she explains to BDE ahead of her feature doc’s world premiere at Thessaloniki, director Anna Giralt Gris was determined to hunt down Duran, and immerse herself into his world of secrecy.