Interviews

It’s not an easy watch, starting with a separation between a mother and a daughter with autism, but Pénélope My Love is a film with love at its heart, and one which chronicles the director’s ever desperate attempts to normalise a child who was always destined to live her life in a world parallel to that of others. The director talks to BDE.   

Indian filmmakers Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas discuss their festival hit Writing With Fire with acclaimed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. The film, shortlisted for the 2022 Documentary Feature Academy Award, concerns the Indian news agency Khabar Lahariya, run by Dalit (low-caste) Chief Reporter Meera and her feisty understudy, crime reporter Suneeta.

Megan Mylan has one Oscar to her name already, for her 2008 film Smile Pinki, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary short. Now, she is in the running again for her feature documentary Simple As Water, The film, shot between 2016 and 2018, examines the lives of various Syrian families, most of them refugees, in the wake of the civil war which devastated their homeland.

Jimmy Goldblum’s Oscar shortlisted 20-minute doc A Broken House, about US-based Syrian architect Mohamad Hafez, has a very unlikely patron and executive producer - leading US Democratic politician and former House Majority Leader, Dick Gephardt. The director explains the project and its development to Business Doc Europe.

American filmmaker and musician Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson discusses his Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), about the star-packed but shamefully mothballed Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, with Academy Award-winning doc director Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna, Diego Maradona).

In his new doc, UK co-director Gabriel Clarke tackles the legendary Arsenal boss Arsѐne Wenger, talking to the man himself as well as Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Sir Alex Ferguson and others. “He just couldn’t find the right time to leave. He couldn’t work out his exit strategy…he was too in love with Arsenal,” Clarke explains to BDE of Wenger’s 22-year term at the North London club.

He was called the Pied Piper of American modern dance. His ballet troupe, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, achieved international renown. However, as Jamila Wignot’s new feature documentary Ailey reveals, Alvin (1931-1989) was a troubled and private figure. She explains more to BDE ahead of her film’s January 7 UK release.

When Posy Dixon attended the British Independent Film Awards earlier this month, the British-American director’s debut feature Keyboard Fantasies, nominated for Best Documentary, was actually already two years old. It is, though, entirely in keeping with the film’s subject matter that it has taken so long to reach audiences. The director explains why to BDE.

“What I found out is what a great, incredible, lovable, joyful guy this man is,” director Tom Donahue tells Business Doc Europe about the Rat Pack crooner and actor, and subject of his new doc. “I had never worked on a documentary where someone was that universally loved.” Sold by Autlook, the film features contributions from RZA, John Hamm and Angie Dickinson.

The title of the latest feature documentary from Sean Fine and Andrea Nix comes from the fist-pumping, team-bonding, high-fiving pre-match battle cry of the US women’s national football team…Let’s Fucking Go! As the directors tell BDE, it is a cry the footballers make as fervently in their fight for equal pay.