Interviews

He may have acted in Game Of Thrones and Bohemian Rhapsody, but over the past decade Brit Tim Plester has had a thriving career as a docmaker, starting with a film about Morris dancing selected for SXSW, and now Southern Journey (Revisited), which recreates ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s famous 1959 road trip through the Deep South.

German Films is again promoting its talent to the world in 2021 via its Face to Face series. This year all the talents are women, and each represents a core specialism within the film industry. Freya Arde, the first composer to be selected for the programme, harmonises with Business Doc Europe.

Alexander Nanau discusses his shocking documentary Collective, nominated for two Academy Awards, which lifts the lid on both ministerial-level corruption and gross abuse of power in his home country of Romania.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Skye Fitzgerald has a phrase for his brand of documentary: “humanitarian cinema.” In his three most recent films, 50 Feet From Syria (2015), Lifeboat (2018) and now Hunger Ward (2020), Fitzgerald has chronicled both the depths of human suffering and the heroic attempts to alleviate it.

Ahead of its UK release (by Dogwoof!), and to celebrate National Puppy Day (March 23), director Elizabeth Lo tells Business Doc Europe how, in her feature doc 'Stray', she wanted to “embed in the dog’s perspective.”

Simone van den Broek took over in March 2021 as Documentary Consultant at the Netherlands Film Fund with a determination to up the ante co-pro-wise and fire Dutch docs out into the world. But first, there is the matter of a pandemic to address…

British director Toby Paton (pictured) discusses his C4 doc Max Clifford: The Fall Of A Tabloid King, about the publicist to the stars who died in prison in 2017 after his conviction as a sex offender.

Producer Ruth Reid (Warner Brothers ITVP) and exec-producer Hanka Kastelicová of HBO Europe held an East Doc Platform online masterclass last week during which they outlined ten lessons learned in producing the upcoming Scandi-noir doc series 'Pray, Obey, Kill'.

Czech filmmaker, journalist and festival programmer Ondřej Moravec’s VR project Darkening is more personal than most, dealing with the subject of debilitating depression and, as importantly, how to cope with it. Producer Hana Blaha Šilarová of Frame Films discusses the work with Business Doc Europe.

Alisa Kovalenko’s Expedition 49 may start beside the coal mines of eastern Ukraine on the Russian border and end in the Himalayan peaks of Nepal, but this is a film neither about war nor mountaineering, points out producer Stephane Siohan. It’s a film about the power of dreams.