Interviews

It isn’t the typical school run, at least as understood by pushy parents in the west. Kids on their way to class in Mohamed El Aboudi’s new documentary School Of Hope (selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition) walk or cycle or ride on donkeys for many miles across the desert. The Helsinki-based director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Raising a School Shooter is the final film in Frida and Lasse Barkfors’ trilogy about social stigma which included Pervert Park (2014), about convicted sex offenders, and Death of a Child (2017) where they meet parents responsible for their child’s death in a hot car. The filmmakers explain their new film, selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition to BDE.

A dazzling dive into the deep underbelly of drug-fuelled red light tourism in Thailand and Cambodia, looking for two missing Finnish junkies through the eyes of their former travel companion. A morally ambiguous trip into the heart of darkness. (CPH:DOX 2021 review)

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.