Interviews

The East Doc Platform (EDP) goes into pitch overdrive Monday through Wednesday as 48 new projects from Eastern Europe (and beyond) are presented online to leading decision-makers within the international doc scene. Event director Zdenek Blaha explains the packed networking event to Business Doc Europe.

Joe Berlinger goes back to basics with Business Doc Europe to discuss the ongoing influence of Truman Capote, and especially his revered, if perhaps flawed, non-fiction novel ‘In Cold Blood’, published in 1966 and which chronicled the murder of a family in Kansas by a pair of drifters.

A new documentary by BAFTA-winning director Stuart Urban shines the spotlight on a shocking missing person case that has intrigued the British public for the past 35 years. The director explains his reasons for making the film to Business Doc Europe.

Docs are at the beating heart of this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival (17-28 March). This is the UK’s longest running queer film event. It began life as Gay’s Own Pictures in 1986, later rebranded as the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and then, in 2014, changed its name to BFI Flare. Programmer Brian Robinson talks to BDE

In recent years, lines between documentary and dramatic features have become increasingly blurred. One new feature which straddles the two forms in bravura fashion is Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ A Cop Movie (which world-premiered in Berlin competition). BDE interrogates the director.

The Last Forest, Luiz Bolognesi’s remarkable new film, is set in an isolated Yanomami community deep in the Amazon forest in Brazil. Its subjects may go about their daily lives, but they are in danger as never before, so much so that police and soldiers no longer intervene to protect them. The director explains to BDE.

In No táxi do Jack (Jack’s Ride) we are told the engaging story of our eponymous hero’s emigration to New York in the 1970s with just $300 in his pocket. Now he is back in his native Portugal and eyeing up an altogether different life, one of retirement. Director Susana Nobre grabs a cab with BDE.

Like almost everyone else, American filmmaker Jeff Orlowski used to have an optimistic and enthusiastic view of social media, he tells Business Doc Europe, until his tech friends at Stanford University began to reveal its dark side…

UK audiences are likely to feel a familiar sinking feeling while watching Athlete A, the harrowing Netflix documentary about disgraced US Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. In late February 2021, seventeen former gymnasts in the UK brought legal action against British Gymnastics for the sustained physical and psychological abuse they endured.

Amsterdam-based Danish filmmaker Maia Elisabeth Sørensen underlines to Business Doc Europe how, despite dealing in dance as a director, choreographer, editor and performer, her film work is about so much more.