Interviews

A single sow and her piglets is the subject matter of Russian documentary master Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. In the film, animals which are usually thought of as meat are here observed as fellow living beings. (Berlinale 2020 review)

Even before Covid, there was loneliness. Finnish Antti Lempiäinen offers three perspectives on suffering, a recently divorced man of 80, a single mum looking for romance and a young techno-loving female gamer who roams the streets of her town in her car to find some measure of solace. The director explains his film to Business Doc Europe.

When Marius Lunde, close friend of director Frederik S. Hana, decides to track down the mother who abandoned him when he was a child, the subsequent odyssey is presented not only as emotionally charged documentary storytelling, but as a piece of bravura and inventive genre filmmaking. Hana explains his exquisite visual mash-up doc to Business Doc Europe.

Telling the extraordinary story of Amin, an Afghan refugee who came to Denmark at an early age as an unaccompanied minor, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee is selected for Documentary Competition this week at Malmö.

Finnish director Suvi West didn’t just want to tell the story of the mistreatment of Sámi people in Finland – she felt the need to tell it, she explains to Business Doc Europe. “I felt like I didn’t have any other choice,” she underlines of her film selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition.

Following on from their Toxic Playground (2009), directors William Johansson Kalén and Lars Edman return to the Chilean town of Arica to continue their investigation into the poisoning of the town people, caused by Swedish waste dumped there in 1984. But this time the town has lawyers fighting its corner, as the filmmakers explain to Business Doc Europe.

A documentary about the great mass of contradictions that is Eurovision was always going to be a winner. But lob in an Icelandic grenade in the form of the BDSM-wearing anti-capitalist band Hatari who sing of hate, debauchery and the purposelessness of life, and you’ve got gold dust. A Song Called Hate director Anna Hildur talks to Business Doc Europe.

Welcome to Jutland, home of the Goths, not the Vikings. In Frigge Fri’s film, set in a small Danish backwater town, three young friends, immensely loyal to one another, like the same music, the same clothes, the same jokes. But then one falls in love with an outsider. Suddenly, the bonds between them threaten to break. Director Fri explains more to BDE.

The young director’s debut feature doc shows the most unlikely of heroes trying to break a world record by playing the shoot ‘em up arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours non-stop, all with the support of his friends. Business Doc Europe thinks of some questions and shoots ‘em Hedegaard’s way.

Imagine you’re a young man living and working in Sweden. Suddenly, you’re told you can’t stay in the country. You are deported almost overnight to Afghanistan where you know no-one, and with no means of escape. This is the fate of Abolfazl, the subject of the new doc by Swedish-based Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Yasaman Sharifmanesh, who speaks to BDE.