Interviews

The Greek doc Panellinion promises to serve up a heady concoction of philosophy, food and drink…and chess. As producer Leonidas Konstantarakos of Alaska Films underlined in his Thessaloniki Doc Fest pitch, it is also a “a story of obsession, solitude and madness” which concerns regulars of a chess café who are “out of place and time in the centre of Athens.”

Films don’t always turn out the way you expect. When Slovenian director Haidy Kancler began work on a feature doc, then called Skiing in Scarves, the expectation was that its three young Afghan female characters would have enriching and uplifting experiences in the west as ski instructors. But as the director explains to BDE, the doc’s eventual title indicates better the protagonists’ actual experience.

It was an incident of playground bullying that took place in a New York school more than half a century ago. There isn’t any archive footage of it, the victim doesn’t want to talk and filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt was one of the fifth graders who joined in the tormenting of the boy at the elementary school in Brooklyn. The filmmaker explains his Oscar nominated short doc to BDE.

Peter Day’s new feature doc Off The Rails (sold by Journeyman Pictures and world premiering in Thessaloniki) shows what happens when the buzz of the thrill wears off. Especially as the film’s two protagonists, parkour-obsessed daredevil youngsters Rikke and Aiden, are facing mental health issues and a gnawing sense of grief over the death of a close friend. The director explains his film to Business Doc Europe.

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.”