Interviews

After her assault by Spanish police officers on the day of the unofficial referendum on Catalonian independence, activist Marta Torrecillas was subjected to a horrific barrage of insults on social media where she was accused of lying about her injuries. “I saw her video. I was very touched by her story because although it was her, it could have been me or any of the other women who had been in polling stations on that day, trying to vote,” director Anna M. Bofarull tells BDE before the world premiere of her new feature doc Rebel.

When Norwegian filmmaker Anette Ostrø began work on The Golden Swan, premiering in the International Competition at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, she was stepping into territory that few directors would ever dare confront: reconstructing the abduction and murder of her own brother, Hans Christian Ostrø, kidnapped in Kashmir in 1995 by the militant group al-Faran. Ostrø talks to Business Doc Europe.

In 2009 director Jukka Kärkkäinen made The Living Room of a Nation which introduced us to Finnish Tero Pihkakoski and his newborn son, Henri. Sixteen years on, Kärkkäinen revisits the pair to record their ongoing journey. “I think he is some kind of mirror image of me,” the director notes philosophically of his friend Tero. “We are getting more and more sad every year…maybe life is just difficult for people like us. When we are happy, we are really happy. When we are sad, we are really, really sad.”

For her feature doc selected for Thessaloniki Doc Fest, Guro Saniola Bjerk takes us to Båtsfjord, an Arctic fishing village where cod is more important than God. Even in one of the coldest places on Earth, you can find the warmest and funniest people there, whether Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Syrian, Tamil…even Russian. “If you are a good worker, they don’t care where you are from,” Bjerk talks of the town’s tolerance toward foreign workers and immigrants.

Producer Jessica Hargrave talks to Business Doc Europe about her highly emotional documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, directed by Ryan White, about the witty, warm and fast-talking word-poet Andrea Gibson, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. “I have never been in a situation like this before when I know almost certainly that I was going to lose someone as I walked toward them,” Hargrave reflects. “It’s a very unusual experience…it helped us recognise the urgency of life.”

In Alison McAlpine’s multi award-winning Perfectly A Strangeness, now nominated for a Short Doc Oscar, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory in the desert. When the director first encountered the huge observatory domes in La Silla, in the Chilean desert, she was reminded of the ancient standing stones she saw on the Scottish island of Orkney. “These huge metallic giants, even when they were closed, they felt to me like they were living because of the sounds,” she tells BDE.

In her analysis of a murder in a small close-knit Florida community, Geeta Gandbhir, who won the Directing Award for US documentary at Sundance 2025, presents a devastating critique of race, inequality and the vigilante-style ‘stand your ground’ legislation in operation in the US today. “The right to defend yourself…has been weaponised against black and brown people as a licence to kill,” she tells BDE. The film is in the running for a Feature Doc Academy Award.

Opening the 22nd Glasgow FF, Everybody To Kenmure Street is about neighbours and activists in the south side of the city who, in the early summer of 2021, came together in an act of inspirational civil resistance to prevent the immigration authorities taking away two residents from their community. Filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra discusses his film, which world-premiered at Sundance, with Business Doc Europe.

Joshua Seftel’s new film follows well-known CBS broadcast journalist Steve Hartman and his friend, photographer Lou Bopp, as they visit homes of kids who lost their lives in school shootings. “I felt that this approach Steve was taking was just a beautiful way of reframing the issue and taking it out of the usual political debate,” Seftel tells BDE, “and focusing on the human toll this was taking and the ripple it leaves with these families who no longer have a child, but just have an empty room.”

US filmmaker Craig Renaud talks to BDE about his late brother; docmaker, journalist and eponymous subject of the Oscar-nominated Armed Only With a Camera. Brent was the first US journalist to die while reporting on the war in Ukraine and, at times, the film makes for a very difficult and disturbing watch. “When Brent was killed, it was instinctual, I knew that I had to keep filming…it was a hundred per cent what Brent would have wanted me to do,” Craig underlines. Brent Renaud is also credited as co-director of the film.