Interviews

Lucy Kerr’s arthouse triptych documentary, selected for FID’s Flash Competition plays both as a riveting piece of storytelling and a cri du coeur for safe practice within the movie stunt industry. The director straps in with Business Doc Europe.

Japanese director Kyosi Sugita talks to Business Doc Europe about his plot-free existential odyssey Haruhara San’s Recorder, selected for FIDMarseille’s International Competition and inspired by a tanka, a 31-syllable one line poem, written by the celebrated poet and author Naoko Higashi.

The 32nd FID Marseille kicks of July 19 with Mano a Mano by Priscilla Telmon and Mathieu Moon Saura, screened in the company of none other than the great footballing poet/thesp Eric Cantona. Festival director Jean-Pierre Rehm talks to BDE both about putting on this year’s event and about this year’s Guest of Honour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

At Cannes Docs, French director Jean-Gabriel Périot discussed both his Directors Fortnight selection Returning to Reims (Fragments) and his upcoming project Facing Darkness, both archive-based, during a panel organised by Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel.

Netherlands-based Chinese producer Jia Zhao of Muyi Film explains why she got involved in Zhao Liang’s urgent but nevertheless highly lyrical documentary on the ever present threat of nuclear catastrophe to the planet and humanity. The film screens in the Cinema for the Climate section.

At the beginning of the Doc Alliance Award-winning The Blunder of Love which tells of the relationship between director Rocco Di Mento’s maternal grandparents, we are immediately primed for what is to come: “I had no idea what abyss this dazzling thing we call love would pull me into,” says the filmmaker. He elaborates with BDE.

Speaking to Business Doc Europe a few hours before the world premiere (Special Screening) of her feature doc The Velvet Queen (La Panthère des Neiges), director Marie Amiguet jokes that she felt more nervous about walking up the red carpet than she ever did when she was high in the mountains of Tibet making the film.

When he came to assemble his documentary Little Palestine: Diary Of A Siege, Abdullah Al Khateeb discovered he had around 500 hours of material. He had shot and shot and shot. “Most of the footage was not made in order to make a documentary,” the director remembers to Business Doc Europe.

Like the great surrealist himself, Spanish filmmaker Javier Espada was born in the town of Calanda in Aragon and was a teenager when he first discovered Buñuel’s work, he tells BDE. He sneaked into a screening of one of the director’s movies and was immediately beguiled. The movie he saw featured drumming music very similar to that played in his home town at Easter.

The Chilean doc scene is blossoming in the wake of Maite Alberdi’s Oscar nomination for The Mole Agent. That is the message from Constanza Arena, the director of promotional agency, CinemaChile. In spite of the travel restrictions placed on Latin Americans because of the pandemic, Arena has made it to the Cannes market. Six Chilean producers are also in town.