Interviews

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.

Of course, Turkish siblings Zeynep and Mahmut are not ‘terrible’ at all. They’re smart, articulate and ambitious, but denied at each turn by religious and societal conservatism. Brother Ahmet, who returned to the family house after a 20-year absence, chronicles their lives as they seek independence and/or emancipation. He explains more to BDE.

Norwegian director Anders Hammer doesn’t yet know precisely how he will spend Oscar night or, indeed, whether he’ll be in black tie. However, he reassures readers that he won’t be wearing the hoodie that he is dressed in during his interview with BDE.

There are warmer, easier places to make documentaries than Siberia. This, though, is where intrepid Belgian independent director Liesbeth De Ceulaer headed to make her bold new doc/drama hybrid feature, Holgut (a joint world premiere both at Visions du Réel and at CPH: DOX). The director explains why to BDE.

Welcome to the puppet show. Using life-like dolls, Tomasz Wolski’s new feature documentary, world-premiering in Nyon, remembers seismic events in Communist-controlled Poland in December 1970. The director looks back a half century with Business Doc Europe.

Mexican-American director Natalia Almada’s documentary Users is a poetic meditation both on motherhood and on the way that technology is disrupting humans’ relationship with the natural world. The director gets lyrical with Business Doc Europe.

In her new film Zinder (screening in competition in Visions du Reel and in Change Makers at CPH Dox) Aicha Macky looks at gang culture in Niger from the inside. She explains her film to Business Doc Europe.

At the beginning of the pandemic Michele Aiello was granted permission to take his camera into the general hospital of Brescia, Northern Italy, close to Europe’s then-Covid epicentre. His subsequent doc My Place Is Here chronicles the terror, the love, the bitter sadness and the bravery that he witnessed. He talks to BDE.