Interviews

In a film whose colour palette registers the melancholic aesthetic of a Rembrandt painting, Polish filmmaker Karol Pałka goes deep into the heart of the Polish countryside to chronicle four years in the lives of mother Danusia and daughter Basia, in the process telling a moving story of longing and absence. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Samuel G Barbosa’s debut feature documentary, about the late Portuguese experimental master filmmaker Paulo Rocha, is described as “a dialogue between master and apprentice,” and offers a unique perspective on a European auteur whose work demands reappraisal by new audiences. Barbosa explains why to Business Doc Europe.

In Eliane Esther Bots’ In Flow of Words, interpreters from the Balkan region must apply the same level of neutrality and detachment to the evidence and testimonies they hear at the Yugoslavia Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, whether it be from victims or those suspected/accused of perpetrating war crimes.

Intimacy is at the core of Naomi Pacifique’s short film ‘after a room,’ made at the London Film School and selected for Locarno Pardi di domani. But while the two main characters, Naomi and Ram (and at times a third, Marina), are often naked, it is not sexual or romantic intimacy that the director is interested in portraying. Director Pacifique explains more.

Before he begins a 23-month prison sentence, a Muslim veteran of the war in the Balkans sets a series of tasks for his three sons, each of whom goes through a significant personal evolution over the subsequent two year period. Director Francesco Montagner explains more to Business Doc Europe.

“Oil is in some ways at the centre of the biggest challenge facing mankind right now,” director Saeed Taji Farouky tells Business Doc Europe about his new film A Thousand Fires, world-premiering at Locarno. “It's a political issue. It's an issue of climate. It’s an issue of capitalism and exploitation.”

In Yellow Saturday (or Les rendez-vous de samedi) there is somewhat of the ‘when gilets jaunes met Jules et Jim,’ as the recent French yellow jacket protests are graphically chronicled alongside the fictional story of Pierre Bolex and his endeavours to date Paris’ most beautiful women.

Set in a run-of-the-mill hotel and framed within a series of static shots, we hear the fascinating and provocative musings/reflections of avant-garde sound collagist Terre Thaemlitz (better known as DJ Sprinkles) on the subjects of patriarchy, identity, eschewing online engagement and modern-day paucity of language. Director Serge Garcia explains more to BDE.

Janis Rafa’s visually stunning, borderline grand guignol short film Lacerate, set in a neglected aristocratic house that contains both a dead body and a pack of feral dogs, was made in response to a commission from the Italian Fondazione In Between Art Film for its project ‘Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence.’

Hier, the title of Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s short film selected for FID Marseille International Competition, means ‘here’ in Dutch but ‘yesterday’ in French, which adds potency to a work that in large part deals both with The Netherlands’ colonial past and its implications for the Dutch sense of ‘here and now.’ The director explains more.