Interviews

Visions du Réel director Emilie Bujès opens up to Business Doc Europe about the 2021 edition that welcomes back filmmakers, industry and specific audiences to Nyon. “Ideologically for us, this is a very important gesture,” she underlines of the festival’s first tentative steps towards normality.

The Movies That Matter human rights film festival runs online 16-25 April with new documentary and fiction competitions and, for the first time, an international Industry programme that will run 19-21 April. Festival director Margje de Koning points out what really matters to Business Doc Europe.

Business Doc Europe talks to feature doc debutante Marie Eve Hildbrand whose Healers, both a family affair and a wide-ranging meditation on different approaches to (and philosophies about) healthcare, launches the 52nd edition of Visions du Réel.

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.