Interviews

Mark Cousins is back in Sundance with yet another magnum opus, this time telling the history of the doc genre. Park City will present the first part of what will eventually be a 16-hour odyssey. Cousins’ “impulse” was to communicate to audiences his own sense of wonder about all the documentaries that have enraptured him over the years. “The magic is out there. There’s a world outside ourselves which is so complex - a full spectrum of everything we can imagine - the joys and sorrows of being alive,” he tells BDE.

UK producer Beth Earl talks to BDE about Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s highly creative feature doc on the late Marianne Faithfull, which world-premiered at Venice 2025 and is now selected for Sundance. “I think that there is this moment now in our culture where we're re-examining how people are remembered, and who should be remembered and why are they remembered and what we remember them for,” Earl tells BDE of the film’s illustrious subject.

Fergie Chambers may be one of the richest people in America, but he’s also a Marxist revolutionary who lives without any visible trappings of extreme wealth. During the course of Sinéad O’Shea’s film he also becomes a Muslim. “It’s so interesting that someone who comes from one of America’s wealthiest families has decided to rebel against the capitalist system and is intent on creating a communist revolution,” O’Shea tells BDE.

Selected for Sundance World Cinema Documentary Comp and sold by Dogwoof, Birds of War tells the story of the love affair between a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman. It was a romance which began in extraordinarily unlikely circumstances, in the shadow of war and upheaval. Filmmakers Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak talk to Business Doc Europe.

The 2021 K2 disaster has already assumed its place in the grim history of mountaineering tragedies. It’s not a spoiler alert to reveal that five people died. “We realised early on that, in some ways, this was a classical story of survival, competition, and all the other riveting elements of the mountaineering genre,” director Amir Bar-Lev tells BDE, “but in other ways, it was a snapshot of civilisation at this moment…and we humans bring our greatest traits and our worst traits wherever we go.”

At the upcoming European Film Awards, host Mark Cousins will veer away from what he sees as the growing emptiness of formula-driven cultural rituals. But rather than reject the awards format outright, Cousins aims to work through it, he tells BDE, retaining the core business of giving out prizes while puncturing the overall predictability of such events. “This is almost like taking our vows again, our cinematic vows, reminding ourselves why this art form is so extraordinary,” he says.

Fifty years after her grandmother Michaela Madden was kidnapped and held hostage, director Mimi Wilcox connects this very personal story to the infamous tales of heiress Patty Hearst and Swedish Kristin Enmark, the victim most closely associated with the origins of the term Stockholm Syndrome. As Wilcox tells BDE, her Oscar-shortlisted short film has sparked heated debate about whether the syndrome actually exists, or whether it’s a construct dreamed up by authorities and psychiatrists, invariably male, to demonise the behaviour of hostages, invariably women.

Hilla Medalia’s Oscar-shortlisted short film follows the silent vigil being held in Tel Aviv by a small group of Israeli activists who stand in a public square holding photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza by Israel. “We did this film very quickly. We started in June and it was already in theatres in LA at the end of September,” Medalia says. “And we did it with no money…it felt urgent and we needed it out.”

In the short doc Classroom 4, thirty students - 15 of whom are imprisoned, 15 coming from a local college - engage in a fifteen-week course on the history of crime and punishment in the US, all as part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. What emerges is a moving and uplifting study in human connection and a deep acknowledgement of shared values, despite the radically contrasting circumstances of the participants. Director Eden Wurmfeld, professor Reiko Hillyer and student Nick Fiveoaks discuss the Oscar-shortlisted film with BDE.

BDE talks to Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing about their Oscar short-listed feature doc Folktales, set in Arctic Norway and chronicling a year in the lives of three students at a folk high school in Norway. No family. No social media. Just classmates and sled dogs by way of companionship. “I did not know I was going to come out of this experience so changed, so touched. I had this incredible life experience that is part of me now,” says Grady.