Interviews

Producer-director Jacqueline Farmer will be overseeing the Sunny Side panel, Why We’re Still Talking About Women? (Tues June 22, 4.00 PM, CEST). As she explains to Business Doc Europe, it’s a question to which she herself has many answers.

Isa Willinger’s new doc project stems from the assertion made by the late Ukrainian director Kira Muratova that “women are slaves, so they make vengeful films. They tell it like it is.” Willinger will set out to test this claim through discussion with some of contemporary cinema’s most fervent and articulate female voices. Producer Alex Tondowski talks to BDE.

After 10 years, pioneering film executive and equal rights campaigner Anna Serner will be stepping down from her position as CEO of the Swedish Film Institute later this autumn. On the eve of Sunny Side Of The Docs, which will include her contribution to the June 21 Diversity panel, Serner looks back at a decade in which there has been huge change within the global film industry.

Ahead of Sunny Side of the Doc’s June 21 kick-off, Director of Strategy and Development Mathieu Béjot emphasises his event’s core remit (“its DNA”) to forge co-production and co-financing opportunities and to underline how, more than ever, ‘storytelling matters.’

As a film critic, Laurent Roth frequently watched and reviewed the films of Israeli director Amos Gitaï. As a festival programmer, he oversaw a retrospective of Gitaï’s work at Marseilles Doc Fest. Over the years, he came to know Gitaï personally and even to visit him in Israel. Now, he has made a film about the director, which he discusses with BDE.

When filmmakers Jeremy Ungar and Ivaylo Getov’s journeyed to Cuba to see the all-female a cappella group Vocal Vidas after a tip-off by their producer, they freely admit that they “lucked out.” The filmmakers’ rousing musical doc Soy Cubana had its international premiere this week at Sheffield. The pair tell all to BDE.

Director Clive Patterson and Emmy award-winning journalist Sorious Samura talk to Business Doc Europe about their (somewhat fraught) documentary Sing, Freetown, premiering today at Sheffield, which set out to tell another story of Sierra Leone, not one focussing on Ebola, cholera, violence, war and corruption.

Anais Taracena’s film is the second South American doc in recent months about someone going undercover to expose injustice. But the tone of the two films couldn’t be more different. While Maite Alberdi’s Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent was playful and whimsical, Guatemalan Taracena’s film is altogether more hard hitting. She talks to BDE.

Ask British filmmaker Nick Green if he liked tycoon-on-the-run Carlos Ghosn, the subject of his new doc world premiering in Sheffield, and he gives an equivocal answer. “He has got an extraordinarily impressive brain…he has got extraordinary powers of recall but he is not an easy man to get on with,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

“Art sometimes makes people become stupid,” Antoine Vitkine tells Business Doc Europe as his documentary about Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, the most expensive art work in history (it sold for $400 million), has its UK premiere at Sheffield.