Interviews

It’s late Monday afternoon. Romanian director Sebastian Mihăilescu is returning home after the day’s shoot on his debut dramatic feature, a surrealist yarn about a man who wakes up and discovers his penis is missing. 24 hours before, Mihăilescu was in Portugal having made a flying visit there for the shared world-prem screening of his new documentary. Now he is talking to Business Doc Europe.

Vadim Kostrov is the wunderkind of contemporary Russian cinema. Still in his early 20s, he has already directed nine films and his work has been shown at international festivals from FID Marseille to Sheffield. This week, his Narodnaya trilogy has been showing at Doclisboa, as has another of his films, Winter. He explains his brand of ‘cinema' to Business Doc Europe, certainly not his brand of ‘storytelling.’

In the Generation Africa short doc Stay Up, which receives its world premiere both in Lisbon and Leipzig, Mariam, a woman who suffered shocking abuse as a child in Mali, deals with her trauma through the medium of dance within a troupe in the neighbouring Burkina Faso. Director Aïssata Ouarma explains to Business Doc Europe her inspiring film about hope and resilience.

Eight new German doc projects at advanced stage were pitched this week at DOK Leipzig, both online and in-person. The session was moderated by German Films MD Simone Baumann and doc producer Tanja Georgieva-Waldhauer of Elemag Pictures. The D-Facto Motion Works-in-Progress Prize, valued at €10.000, went to President’s Tailor – From Auschwitz to the White House.

In Maria João Guardão’s documentary, an eviction notice served to leading dance choreographer João Fiadeiro, demanding that he vacate the Lisbon property that has served both as a dance studio and gathering place for artists for the past 30 years, sets in motion a poignant yet joyous month of farewells, reminiscences and artistic endeavour.

“Business will come to those that are brave,” explains Ji.hlava IDFF’s Marek Hovorka on the extra emphasis placed this year on experimentation, heightened artistic approach and new talent, as evidenced both by the festival’s New Visions programme of 21 highly diverse European and US projects and the fact that half the main competition selections are by debut filmmakers.

Andrea Slovakova guides Business Doc Europe through Ji.hlava 2021’s wide-ranging Fascinations experimental programme, the centrepiece of which comprises a (re)discovery of the Romanian avant-garde and its practitioners who were creating brilliant and challenging film works behind the Iron Curtain from the 1960s through to its fall.

Ever since domiciles within Lisbon’s 'bairros' started to be let for Airbnb rental, neighbourhood cohesion has suffered. So when, in 2020, the pandemic put the brakes on tourism, large parts of the Portuguese capital were turned into a ghost town. “That’s what this is, a film about ghosts,” explains the director to Business Doc Europe.

Leipzig’s five-day DOK Industry event kicks off 25 October with a programme designed to support filmmakers and their projects/films from inception to festival roll-out and eventual release, and everything in-between. New programme head Nadja Tennstedt tells Business Doc Europe what to expect.

DOK Leipzig director Christoph Terhechte is pretty much delighted that docs are back in cinemas and on the big screen where they belong, away from all the distractions of the living room, such as texts that have to be read, coffee that has to be made, knocks on the front door that have to be answered. “I don't think cinema and multitasking are compatible,” he confides to Business Doc Europe.