Interviews

Raul Domingues’ new feature documentary was shot in the fields and forests surrounding the family farm in Portugal and its main character - that tough, gnarled-looking old woman still carrying out back-breaking work - is the director’s grandmother. There is nothing easy about the lifestyle Domingues depicts, but his love for the land is apparent in every frame of the doc.

Two years on from the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) launch at Berlinale 2020, co-directors Brigid O’Shea and Marion Schmidt remind Business Doc Europe of the association’s raison d’être, explain its modus operandi, underline the importance of docfests both as thought hubs and venues for business/creative interaction, and give an overview of DAE activities during Berlin 2022.

The first film selected for Berlinale from the Central African Republic, We, Students! is a complex study both of the country’s youth and a university education system which is both physically rundown and seemingly blighted by corruption. Director Rafiki and producer Boris Lojkine speak to Business Doc Europe.

The former BFI London and Sydney FF director talks to BDE about her new role at Sheffield Doc Fest which sees a number of other new appointments in 2022, including Asif Kapadia as Guest Curator. “Fundamentally the real challenge (and it's quite different from approaching a festival pre-pandemic) is thinking about what the shape of the festival needs to be for the future,” says Stewart.

Nelly & Nadine (a world premiere this month in Berlin) is one of several films that Swedish director Magnus Gertten has been inspired to make using remarkable newsreel footage shot in his home town of Malmö at the end of the Second World War. He explains more to Business Doc Europe.

It sounds like a Bergman title, and in fellow Swede Maud Nycander’s tearjerker of a doc, we are delivered exactly what that title promises. Love, then divorce. But as the director explains to Business Doc Europe, love doesn’t just disappear after separation…

It may be visually dynamic, artistically audacious and propelled by a blow your wig off soundtrack, but Sao Paolo: Open Wound is first and foremost a film of protest, and a very angry one at that, against Brazilian president Bolsonaro and his sanctioning of both racism and grotesque levels of intolerance towards Brazil’s LGBTQ+ community.

The popular Danish schlager singer Johnny Hansen, of the band Kandis, inspires derision and devotion in equal measure. He is deemed crass among sophisticated city folk while considered a Messiah by many in Denmark’s provinces. Jesper Dalgaard’s poignant doc favours the latter constituency, and in the process reveals their rich and at times heartbreaking sense of humanity. The director explains his film to BDE.

“All hell broke loose,” one observer remarks with what turns out to be understatement early on in Attica, the Oscar-shortlisted Showtime documentary directed by Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry. The film tells the apocalyptic story of what happened following a prison riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State in September 1971. Prison staff were taken as hostages. Negotiations began. Then, tensions began to ratchet up.

These are heady days for Field of Vision, the New York-based filmmaker-driven visual journalism unit, with three doc features having screened back to back at Sundance and a short doc in the running for an Oscar nomination. FoV chief Charlotte Cook gets visionary with Business Doc Europe.