Interviews

Iranian director Firouzeh Khosrovani discusses the IDFA competition selection Radiograph of a Family, her brilliantly constructed and devastatingly moving story of her parents before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Following on from their Toxic Playground (2009), directors William Johansson Kalén and Lars Edman return to the Chilean town of Arica to continue their investigation into the poisoning of the town people, caused by Swedish waste dumped there in 1984. But this time the town has lawyers fighting its corner. Arica world premieres in IDFA Frontlight.

In Long Live Love, screening in Best of Fests, Danish director Sine Skibsholt records the loving but tempestuous relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter.

“We may make very dark films but we actually laugh a lot,” says Signe Byrge, co-founder of widely admired Danish outfit Final Cut for Real, whose very dark films include Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, The Distant Barking of Dogs by Simon Lereng Wilmont and the IDFA 2020 Best of Fests selection Songs of Repression.

Matti Paunio started his job as Head of Production at The Finnish Film Foundation in the autumn of last year. Then, the pandemic came. “As with everybody, this was a total surprise and changed a lot of things we had planned,” Paunio says of the sudden challenges posed by Covid-19.

Norwegian producer Bjarte Mørner Tveit of Piraya Film discusses the Nordic collaboration (plus UK, courtesy of BBC Storyville) on the dynamic doc mini-series The Mole: Undercover in North Korea.

Producer Emile Hertling Péronard has been taking his first steps into new media this week as part of the team pitching Thunder And Drum as a DocLab Forum Project.

In Bitter Love, screening in Best of Fests, Jerzy Sladkowski tells us that while the rest of the world takes to the road to deal their problems, Russians take to the river. In this instance on a Volga cruise ship, full of lonely hearts. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Saskia Gubbels’ Sheltered in Dutch Competition is a paean to love for our furry four-legged friends. But set in the Amsterdam Animal Shelter, it is also an indictment of the human species and its frequent propensity towards cruelty. The director explains all.

No film at IDFA this year tells a story stranger or more unsettling than Love It Was Not, recent winner of Best Israeli Film at Docaviv and screening in Luminous. It’s an account of a love affair, if it can be described as such, between beautiful a young Jewish Auschwitz inmate, Helena Citron, and Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer.