Interviews

“I got into all of this because my uncle went through conversion therapy when he came out as trans as a child,” Kristine Stolakis explains to BDE of what led her to make her feature documentary (acquired by Netflix just before its premiere at the Tribeca Festival earlier this summer) about the so-called “pray gay away movement” through which LGBTQ people were encouraged by the church to use conversion therapy to change their sexual orientation.

I Am Belmaya, the new film by Sue Carpenter and Belmaya Nepali, was up for two BIFAs earlier this month, for Best Doc and The Raindance Discovery award. Belmaya isn’t just the co-director of the documentary, she is its main subject too. The film tells the inspirational story of how the young Nepalese woman transforms her life through filmmaking. Co-director Carpenter explains to BDE.

The European Film Awards may be presented virtually this weekend, but European Film Academy Chair Mike Downey goes face to face with BDE on the subject of docs and doccers, the robustness of the sector, the increasingly high value of creative output and its soaring appeal to ever-widening audiences, as well as EFA’s continuing support and advocacy activities via the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR).

Chilean filmmakers Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff are used to living in small apartments in Santiago. However, after they shot their 2018 film Los Reyes (which premiered that year at IDFA) and adopted one of its main protagonists - a stray dog called Chola whom they found prowling round the local skate park - life changed radically for the pair. They explain their subsequent Forum pitch-winning project to BDE.

When filmmaker Julia Bobkova was first approached by the St Petersburg Documentary Film Studio about making a documentary on Russian theatre guru Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (1863-1938), she wasn’t sure how to approach the task. Her brief was to look at how Stanislavski influences modern stage and screening acting. She explains to BDE how she made the story “come alive to a modern audience.”

Back in October, during DOK Leipzig, Sasha Kulak’s online pitch for her feature doc A Hawk as Big as a Horse generated a long and spontaneous round of applause, despite being made from a moving car on the way to Tbilisi. BDE quizzes Kulak again on her audacious tale of the Russian bi-gender Lydia who wants to recreate the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe in her home near the woods on the outskirts of Moscow.

British artist and filmmaker Sarah Beddington talks to Business Doc Europe about her debut feature documentary Fadia’s Tree, which premiered last month at the London Palestine Film Festival and which chronicles the director’s search for an ancient mulberry tree on the confiscated land of a woman now confined to a Lebanese refugee camp.

Last week, Anna Shishova-Bogolubova’s new documentary The New Greatness won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, an important boost for a project predicted to surface on the festival circuit in early 2022. International sales are handled by Autlook. The filmmaker explains her project to Business Doc Europe.

Hitchhiking French director Yohan Guignard tells Business Doc Europe about his documentary in which he follows an Oklahoma lone operator cop so depressed about his work that he turned to Couchsurfing to force himself to meet other people, which was how Guignard came upon his subject in the first place.

Diana Tabakov talks to BDE about the online portal that has, for the past 16 years, delivered festival docs to living rooms around the world. DAFilms is currently presenting the ‘No Short Cuts’ Thomas Imbach retrospective, and will host on December 7 an online live-stream interview between Imbach and Argentinian critic/curator Roger Koza.