Interviews

When Finnish filmmaker Tuija Halttunen looks up at the clouds, she sees herself. As she explains to BDE of her film selected for Nordic:Dox Competition, “I strongly feel that I am part of this world in physical levels in many ways. Clouds have a life span like we do. We can see a summary of our choices during our lives in those clouds.”

As she approaches her final CPH:DOX (running April 21-May 12) before departing to become Director of the National Film School Denmark, Business Doc Europe finds the event’s founder and CEO Tine Fischer in resolute mood.

Filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Müller was a fan of Patricio Galvez, a musician and fellow Chilean living in Sweden. But as he tells BDE, the director never imagined that he would end up accompanying Galvez on a journey to Syria to rescue his seven grandchildren, nor that he would make a film about it.

Swiss director/producer Charlie Petersmann and producer Stephanie Argerich (mnemosyn films) presented their work-in-progress about the innate lyricism and cultural diversity of the local construction industry. The film follows ‘the lives of men who came from elsewhere to build the Switzerland of tomorrow,’ say the filmmakers.

'Sheltered' is a paean to our love for our furry four-legged friends. Set in the Amsterdam Animal Shelter, it is also an indictment of the human species' frequent propensity towards cruelty. Dutch director Saskia Gubbels explains all.

“It was all triggered when an Albanian scholar told me that this subject had been done a thousand times and never correctly,” Slovenian director Marija Zidar recalls to Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which led to her making Reconciliation (a premiere at CPHDOX in Next Wave Award this month).

Lance Oppenheim originally embarked on his project Some Kind Of Heaven (due for UK release in May 2021 by Dogwoof) as part of an undergraduate thesis at Harvard. The film looks at the lives of characters living in The Villages, the Florida retirement home that also provides the backcloth for Valerie Blankenbyl’s doc The Bubble (VdR 2021).

It’s the island that time passed by. Once a thriving community in the Soviet era, it is now largely abandoned by the Russian government. And co-director Svetlana Rodina’s interested in it was piqued by a photograph, she tells Business Doc Europe.

There are few documentaries either as oddball or as deliciously engaging as the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent, directed by Chilean Maite Alberdi. As co-producer Denis Vaslin of Dutch production house Volya Films explains, as soon as he encountered the director’s work over ten years ago, he knew she was a talent worth investing in.

On the face of it, the distinguished French novelist, biographer, filmmaker and screenwriter doesn’t seem an obvious fit as guest of honour at a doc festival like Nyon. However, as he points out to BDE, he has always been passionate about the documentary form.