Interviews

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.

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.