Interviews

Kirsten Johnson, whose Dick Johnson is Dead was nominated for the Feature Doc Oscar in 2021, spoke to Jessica Kingdon about her 2022 Oscar-shortlisted film Ascension, which explores cinematically the pursuit of the ‘Chinese Dream’. “I can feel your pleasure as filmmakers and cinematographers in particular, and also I have to say I do think it’s really an ode to the great art of documentary producing,” said Kirsten.

Italian master docmaker Gianfranco Rosi (Notturno) spoke to Robert Greene about his Oscar-shortlisted film Procession, about six men who suffered sexual abuse by Catholic priests but who nevertheless find empowerment together by creating fictional scenes depicting rituals of power in the church.

Eight years after her triumph with Citizenfour (2014), American filmmaker Laura Poitras is back on the Oscar trail with her short, Terror Contagion, which is one of the films included in Neon’s portmanteau feature, The Year Of The Everlasting Storm. The filmmaker discusses her Oscar shortlisted doc with Business Doc Europe.

“The film is about a relationship, about two people in love and about a young man who wants what all of us want…stability, peace, happiness, love,” Elizabeth Mirzaei explains of her Oscar-shortlisted short doc about Shaista, happily married to Benazir, but who must make a life choice, the consequences of which we see in the second half of the film.

The brothers talk to BDE about their Oscar-shortlisted animated doc telling the shocking story of the US camp that housed Hitler’s top scientists who were captured during World War II. More importantly it presents the testimonies of Jewish refugees, some survivors of the Holocaust, that were enlisted to interrogate and stand guard over the Nazis, before the true reason for their incarceration becomes evident...

The legendary Frederick Wiseman spoke to E. Chai Vasharelyi and Jimmy Chin (co-directors of Free Solo, 2018) about their Oscar shortlisted feature documentary The Rescue (National Geographic), which details the audacious 2018 mission to free 12 boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand.

“It is horrifying; it is beautiful; it is an exercise in hope, making the film,” Bafta-winning and Oscar-nominated Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) tells Camilla Nielsson of her Academy Award-shortlisted feature doc President. The film details the 2018 Zimbabwean presidential election as 40-year-old opposition candidate Nelson Chamisa runs against the incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Harar-based documentary Faya Dayi explores the role that the addictive plant khat plays in Ethiopian society. “The meaning this plant had, which had existed for centuries, it was completely morphing in front of our eyes. It was being separated from its spiritual roots,” she explains to BDE. “[Consuming] it had become a pastime, completely devoid of those anchoring ideas, those anchoring emotions.”

Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont discovered the orphanage that features in his Sundance World Cinema Comp film A House Made of Splinters when in Ukraine making his The Distant Barking Of Dogs (2017). “They’ve been through a lot of tragedy in their lives but still they have this beautiful and super precious hope that things will be better in the future,” Wilmont tells BDE of his young subjects.

With no Doc Salon in 2022, Dennis Ruh, Director of the European Film Market, and Martina Valentina Baumgartner, EFM Documentary Coordinator, answer questions posed by Business Doc Europe about how they plan to tackle docs, the needs of doccers and all issues pertaining to the documentary sector during the upcoming edition, running 10-17 February.