Interviews

In a few days, nominee Maite Alberdi will be setting off from Chile to Los Angeles for this year’s Academy Awards, to be held on April 25. She will have a very special companion, the film’s star (and eponymous mole) 83-year-old Sergio Chamy, who will be boarding a plane for the first time in his life. The director talks to BDE.

In Bellum – The Daemon of War, Swedish directors David Herdies and Georg Götmark invite three disparate characters to meditate on their perceptions of war, a US veteran of Afghanistan, a Swedish developer of AI for use in battle, and a US photographer whose latest work chronicles the Afghanistan conflict.

It’s one of the most unlikely hit documentaries of the year – about a group of bus drivers from Dorset who put on a stage adaptation of the classic sci-fi horror film Alien (famous for its scene of a succubus exploding out of John Hurt’s chest). Intrepid filmmakers Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey space out with BDE following their SXSW success.

It remains to be seen whether My Octopus Teacher will get its tentacles on an Oscar on April 25, but the Netflix Original documentary, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, is already a phenomenon. Co-director Reed explains all to Business Doc Europe.

A simple question – what is a concerto? – sets in motion a a conversation between virtuoso pianist/composer Kris Bowers and his astonishing grandad Horace, encompassing over ninety years of lived experience and all distilled into a 13-minute film. Co-director Ben Proudfoot tunes in with BDE.

Austrian filmmaker Valerie Blankenbyl made her doc The Bubble, about a vast Florida retirement complex, just as her parents were eyeing up their own retirement. The director tells BDE about octogenarian snogging, the political power that such an institution exerts as well as the new lease of life many of the residents feel they have been presented.

Czech director Pavel Borecký’s eco-documentary Living Water is on quite a run. It is showing in Visions du Réel in National Competition; in the CPH:SCIENCE section of CPH:DOX shortly afterward and then in Movies That Matter in the Netherlands in a screening arranged in co-operation with the Dutch Ministry Of Foreign Affairs.

Time addresses racism and the cruelty of the US penal system but it does so in a very personal and poetic fashion, told from the perspective of a resilient woman holding her family together as she campaigns for her husband’s release from prison. Director Garrett Bradley describes the evolution of the project to Business Doc Europe.

Director Anthony Giacchino and producer Alice Doyard discuss their poignant and heart-rending film about a 90-year-old former French Resistance fighter, who, together with a teenage companion, visits the Nazi concentration camp where her beloved brother died.

It is just over a year now since Ed Accura, producer of new documentary feature Blacks Can't Swim: The Sequel, co-founded the Black Swimming Association (BSA), set up to encourage black and ethnic minorities to swim. He gets in deep with Business Doc Europe.