Interviews

Mandy Chang, Commissioning Editor BBC Storyville, has been steeped in Forum projects this week, listening to pitches, holding one-on-one meetings and watching rough cuts. It’s all part of her ongoing quest to discover new doc gems that Storyville might board.

The documentary and private detective genres meet in Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent which world premiered at Sundance 2020 and is now selected for IDFA Best of Fests. The Chilean director talks to BDE.

In Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga’s Songs of Repression, screening in IDFA Best of Fests, we hear of acts of evil and encounter acts of kindness. What makes the film so compelling is that many of the film’s characters have been, at some point of their lives, more than capable of both. The directors speak to BDE.

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.