Interviews

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.

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.