Interviews

Shot over three years, Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno presents a mosaic of ‘encounters’ along the borders separating Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon, and follows on from his Berlinale Golden Bear-winning Fire At Sea (2016), about refugees on the island of Lampedusa.

Doclisboa co-director Miguel Ribeiro talks to Business Doc Europe about the creative reappraisal of the festival structure in 2020/21.

Courtroom 3H is Spanish director Antonio Mendez Esparza’s first doc and follows on, in essence, from his fictional Life and Nothing More (2017) which depicted the inherent lyricism within the lives of a black teenager and his minimum-wage mother in one of the US’s poorest neighbourhoods.

In Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds Clive Oppenheimer and Werner Herzog reunite, this time to examine meteors and meteorites (those that make it into the Earth’s atmosphere) from scientific, ethnographic, religious, historical and aesthetic perspectives.

British director Luke Holland died in June after the completion of Final Account, for which he interviewed the last generation of Germans – from Waffen SS to non-military citizens – who, one way or another, played a role in the Holocaust.

Like Pasolini and Mel Gibson before him, Milo Rau journeys to the Italian city of Matera to shoot the tale of Christ’s Passion. But Rau’s Christ is a modern-day anti-slavery activist, his apostles are migrants, and the witnesses to (and participants in) the crucifixion are Matera’s townsfolk and tourists.

Documentary meets gumshoe in Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent which world premiered at Sundance 2020 and premieres digitally in North America September 1, courtesy of Gravitas Ventures. The director talks to BDE.

Pripyat Piano, a short creative documentary by noted Czech composer and filmmaker Eliška Cílková, reveals a hidden memory of ghost town, Pripyat, home to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The film is part of the IDF East Silver Caravan.

In the powerful and jarring Hold Me Right, Serbian actress and rape victim Danijela Stajnfeld discusses the trauma experienced by her and other survivors, at the same time examining the motives of a number of rapists and perpetrators of sexual violence.

Visual artist Mladen Bundalo returns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to tell a hopeful tale of migration, as experienced by the eponymous hero of the title.