Interviews

Like its main characters, Catherine Harte’s Faith and Branko is a documentary as much British as it is Serbian. It’s a film that not only fluctuates between cultures, but also between the professional and the personal through the portrait of the musician couple Faith Elliott and Branko Ristic, and also between the positions of outsider and insider for the filmmaker herself.

“If you’re passionate about cinema, you’re passionate about Morricone, there is no other way around it,” Belgian producer Peter De Maegd of Potemkino explains to Business Doc Europe of his decision to partner on Tornatore’s feature doc about music maestro Ennio Morricone, screening out of competition in Venice.

“It takes you back in time. It is for those people that could never go to those events in the 60s and will never see a Led Zeppelin concert. It’s closest we will ever get to being there.” Director Bernard MacMahon and producer Allison McGourty tell Business Doc Europe how they persuaded the rock and roll gods to share a whole lotta love.

In their ground-breaking volumetric VR world-premiering in Venice, Dutch makers Anna Abrahams and Avinash Changa tell the story of four fierce and ambitious women who decide to fight for their fair share of the wealth on offer during Amsterdam’s Golden Age.

Ahead of the 5-day AJB DOC Film Festival kicking off September 10, director Edhem Fočo explains the distinct appeal of his Al Jazeera Balkans event and why the production and consumption of non-fiction is more important than ever. “Documentary filmmakers can try to reawaken empathy in people, by presenting different realities of different people.”

This is not a review, rather an interview. Nevertheless, I am going to go out on a limb from the start to say that there is something masterly about Diana El Jeiroudi’s Republic of Silence, whether as a paean to love and union, or a chronicle of the Syrian conflict as experienced both from within and from without - as an exile living in Europe. The director explains her documentary to Business Doc Europe.

In late 60s Italy, the 3 best directors of spaghetti westerns were all called “Sergio.” Sergio Leone, the maestro behind The Good, The Bad And The Ugly was the greatest. Sergio Sollima was also a master of the genre. However, the undisputed number two (according to no less an authority than Quentin Tarantino) was Sergio Corbucci, the subject of a new doc by Luca Rea, who faces off with Business Doc Europe.

Boganim’s film tells the story of the community of non-European Mizrahim Jews who settled in the newly formed State of Israel in the 1950s, and the discrimination they feel they have suffered across four generations. The documentary further tells of the Israeli Black Panthers, led by her father Charlie in the 1970s, who squared up to this perceived sense of injustice. Boganim explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Three minutes of pre-WW2 home footage, showing the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish town of Nasielsk, are analysed, re-analysed and then analysed again in Bianca Stigter’s extraordinary debut documentary, world-premiering in Venice. The film is produced by Family Affair Films and executive produced by Steve McQueen.

In 2019, during the ongoing Donbas conflict, French director Loup Bureau spent three months in trenches dug by Ukrainian soldiers fighting separatists supported by Russia. The director discusses his subsequent feature doc, screening Out of Competition, with Business Doc Europe.