Interviews

Didier, the central character in The Echo Of The Herd (La voix du troupeau) is like one of those sad-eyed clowns you see in old silent movies. Deaf since birth and still mourning the loss of his brother Claude, he looks for solace in his work on a cattle farm in Auvergne. Now well into middle-age, he still takes a child-like joy in tending the animals and building fences - but when the cattle suffer, so does he. The director pairing of Matthias Joulaud and Lucien Roux discuss their film with Business Doc Europe.

Amsterdam/Warsaw-based director Piotr Pawlus and Dutch-based producer/co-writer Ruoyao Jane Yao discuss their new collaboration, selected for International Competition at Visions Du Réel, about the everyday lives of Ukrainians whose existences have been turned upside down by the full-scale Russian invasion. “The camera was my eyes,” says Pawlus. “It was very important to get very pure and natural moments. Also, listening. That was the main goal.”

Stuck in Berlin after the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Viv Li, who comes from solid, traditional stock back in Beijing, decided to embrace the German capital’s ‘alternative’ culture scene. Her resulting (mis)adventures are as hilarious as they are poignant, especially when seen in counterpoint to her sober, albeit loving, family life back home. “I realised that there is less and less of ‘binary’ in how we live. There are a lot of differences, but in the end, we're the same,” she suggests to Business Doc Europe.

The German filmmaker discusses his new documentary about Germany’s shocking colonialist legacy in Namibia, and how a certain type of latter-day German tourist still makes the local people feel very uncomfortable. As we see in the film, they may seem like genial westerners but they don’t even try to hide their prejudices. “People being racist is something that to me is no surprise at all,” Jonas Spriestersbach tells BDE.

Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras, who is VdR Industry Special Guest in 2026, tells BDE. Poitras is joined in interview by co-director Mark Obenhaus.

Outgoing Artistic Director Emilie Bujès talks to Business Doc Europe about her ninth and final edition in charge of one of Europe’s leading festivals for non-fiction and hybrid cinema. Under her charge, the festival has emphasised “the cinematic experience first and foremost,” she tells BDE. “But at the same time, I truly believe in the power of creating bridges, spending one hour and a half with somebody looking at things the way they are looking at them, and understanding what they want to share beyond the aesthetic experience - a common life, a common present, a common moment, a common history.”

In his new documentary, set in Morocco, Belgian Jérôme le Maire investigates how a massive renewable energy complex will affect the life of a small Berber tribe. “It was from my own window that I first saw enormous machines raising clouds of dust on the horizon. My research revealed that the world’s largest renewable energy plant was to be built on this collective land - land that until then had belonged to no-one in particular, and yet to everyone,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

When Sabine Fayoux Cantillo took over as Visions du Réel Head of Industry last autumn, the former Associate Director of Program at Chicken & Egg Films in New York was, in a sense, simply coming home. “When this opportunity came up, it was a no-brainer to return to a festival which has meant a lot to me in my career as a documentary worker…and to raise my child in my childhood home,” she tells BDE.

Shot on 16mm, its carefully graded black tones echoing the shadowy, ever-shifting levels of diffused light-and-shade as experienced by unsighted people, A Blind Song documents the tac-til Choir on their visit to Japan to explore the ancient tradition of the Goze - blind nomadic female musicians whose tradition dates back to medieval times. BDE talks to directors Stefano Canapa and Natacha Muslera, along with Cécile Sans, responsible for both writing and voice.

Chronicling one person’s experience of travelling across continents to escape a North African prostitution ring, Coming From the Sea follows a young Nigerian woman who embarks on a perilous odyssey across Europe to rebuild her life and protect her child - but the ghosts of her past are never far behind. “I don't like this word migrants we use in France. I prefer exiled people,” producer Emmanuel Gras tells BDE. “I want us to see them not as just figures of people who come, but as human beings, and above all as adventurers and explorers.”