Interviews

In her debut documentary Greek director Eirini Vourloumis, who describes herself as a night creature, follows three veteran “old school” taxi drivers, Konstantinos (known as Puma), Sunny, and Giorgos, as they drive around the city. “Each character is a reflection of myself,” she underlines to BDE, adding that the film is “my personal ode to the two things I love, which is Athens and taxi drivers!”

In The Great Experiment, Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar offer what they call “a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in America,” during one of the more polarised periods in the last 250 years, from 2017 to 2020. Entirely shot in black and white, the film gives snapshots of different communities and generations, everything from ‘Gays for Trump’ activists to Black Lives Matter to the rise of MAGA. Even though politics are never far away, the film places emphasis on the people, the “humanity,” and how Americans find ways to “co-exist,” Maing tells BDE.

German Jens Schanze’s new documentary places the spotlight squarely on western governments and the rush to extract lithium, vital for everything from cellphones to the car industry, from the Bolivian Andes. “Conditions under which work is done in those mines is not far from conditions a couple of hundred years ago,” Schanze points out. Risks of accidents are very high. The exploitation of the workers is one aspect of “colonial history that you can see in the present.”

When she returns to her family home in Valparaíso (Chile), Gabriela Pena discovers more and more about what happened to her family during the Pinochet era. Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother, who is back in Spain, remains very strained. “We started to understand that travelling to this house and to this city was a way of wanting to connect with my mother,” Gabriela reflects. “From the beginning, we knew we had to combine the present with the past. That was the most difficult thing to do in the film.”

In Swiss filmmaker Ian Purnell’s feature documentary, selected for Main Competition at CPH:DOX, a cable-laying vessel traverses the high seas en route to one of the remote Aleutian Islands that separate the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean. The crew’s mission is to delivery fibre optic connectivity to the Arctic islanders, hitherto denied to them because of their sheer remoteness. Purnell connects with Business Doc Europe.

Revered Faroese actress Birita Mohr hasn’t performed for 12 years and some fans in the Faroe Islands may even have forgotten her, but her son, theatre director, actor and jazz musician Búi Dam, certainly isn’t one of them. To him, she is a legend. In his feature documentary Birita (a world premiere in CPH:DOX) he puts her back on stage to jog the public’s memory. “One of the goals with the film, and also the play, was to take care of her legacy both for the public and for the family - for my children to know who their grandmother was,” Dam tells BDE.

Premiering in the main competition at CPH:DOX 2026, Little Sinner is a profoundly intimate documentary built from more than two decades of personal recordings. Helmed by Daro Hansen and Thomas Papapetros, the film traces Hansen’s journey from Damascus to Denmark while confronting the emotional aftermath of forced marriage, displacement and generational trauma. “The stories within it are incredibly important,” Hansen tells BDE. “So we wanted to balance things carefully. The film is only 90 minutes—how many stories can you tell in that time?”

Business Doc Europe talks to Mandy Chang, who this month was appointed first CEO of the UK advocacy body, Documentary Film Council. “I think if you are privileged enough to work in this industry, you have to give something back - and I feel we are at a critical time in documentary where some of that space that documentaries once took up in the broadcasting schedules has been eroded away by formats and by other kinds of filmmaking,” Chang tells BDE.

Martin, the younger brother of Danish director Emil Langballe, has learning difficulties, as has Martin’s best friend Casper. But that doesn't stop them talking about cars, working on cars, and buying cars. And Martin’s long-held dream is to buy a Honda Civic. “I've always been attracted to these kind of stories of beautiful friendships, and I always liked buddy movies myself, and I thought Martin and Casper were this iconic kind of couple who called out to be filmed,” Langballe tells BDE.

In her feature doc In Defense of Self, Norwegian filmmaker Linn Helene Løken explores the fatal shooting of a man in urgent need of psychiatric help. The film reconstructs the final years of writer Morten Michelsen through more than 35 hours of personal audio recordings, alongside police reconstructions of the incident. World-premiering at CPH:DOX 2026, the 87-minute film examines the fragile intersection between mental healthcare systems and law enforcement, while raising broader questions about responsibility, narrative control and institutional transparency. Director Løken talks to BDE.