Interviews

It is a strange combination of projects to tackle side by side: the horror of Utøya and the blissful, escapist music of Norway’s favourite pop band, A-ha. Director Aslaug Holm discusses how she juggled the two projects, and also how they in some ways overlap.

The Norwegian/US Netflix Original feature doc Sisters on Track by Corinne van der Borch and Tone Grøttjord-Glenne tells the heart-warming story of three siblings (aged 9-12) whose prowess in running shoes is matched only by their indomitable charm and spirit, and by the guidance given them by a single mum and an inspirational coach.

Finnish director Suvi West didn’t just want to tell the story of the mistreatment of Sámi people in Finland - she felt the need to tell it, she explains to Business Doc Europe. “I felt like I didn’t have any other choice,” she underlines of her film selected for the Hot Docs/EFP Changing Face of Europe programme.

US director Lisa Immordino Vreeland discusses her Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation with Business Doc Europe ahead of its UK release this week by Dogwoof.

Heather Millard is British and proud of it, but has been based in Iceland for 12 years now, heading up international production and financing at Compass Films, the company she founded in 2012 and runs alongside Thordur Jonsson. She directs BDE about her upcoming Forum project Band.

Documentary has been pushed up the agenda at the Icelandic Film Centre in recent times with around €1.3m is set aside to support feature docs each year. IFC director Laufey Guðjónsdóttir talks to BDE of a concerted attempt to “get the overall framework stronger for docs.”

French director Julie Ramage discusses her new documentary How To Order Online, about the creative lengths prisoners can go to maintain human and economic exchange when access to communication is limited or denied.

“To me, it was clear from a very early point that I am not doing a film about the murder. I am doing a film about the news [reports] of the murder,” Jan Ijäs emphasises to BDE of his intentions behind Belgrade Forest Incident, in which he visits the Istanbul locations associated with the shocking death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Liisa Karpo, boss of Finnish outfit napafilms, speaks to Business Doc Europe about “Finnish weirdness,” why she is happy to embrace both documentary and fiction, and how she draws on her early film marketing expertise whenever she launches a film.

US film director Raoul Walsh made close to 150 films, and Argentinean director/film professor Nicolás Zukerfeld has seen a great many of them, he tells BDE. But there was something that Walsh may or may not have said which became an obsession for Zukerfeld, and which he was determined to get to the bottom of…