Interviews

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.

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.