Interviews

Stuck in Berlin after the pandemic, artist and filmmaker Viv Li, who comes from solid, traditional stock back in Beijing, decided to embrace the German capital’s ‘alternative’ culture scene. Her resulting (mis)adventures are as hilarious as they are poignant, especially when seen in counterpoint to her sober, albeit loving, family life back home. “I realised that there is less and less of ‘binary’ in how we live. There are a lot of differences, but in the end, we're the same,” she suggests to Business Doc Europe.

Fil Ieropoulos’s hybrid feature Uchronia invokes the wild and restless spirit of Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, as it offers up a latter-day critique of identity, revolution and the role of the artistic avant-garde. It is a film of glorious excess, characterised by a wanton curiosity and a vagabond unrest of style. “Major film festivals are increasingly risk averse these days, much more than they were in the 80s and 90s, the director says. “That said, we are very happy to be at Forum Expanded, the most daring section of the whole of the Berlinale.”

Esther Bannenberg oversees her second edition as chief of DocSalon, which kicks off February 13, running through to Feb 17. “What excites me most is bringing in the networking dynamics at DocSalon and the Archive Market,” she tells BDE, “to make sure that we facilitate business opportunities as well as strengthen the ties between creatives and industry execs [and] an open informal exchange on all levels, while serving the documentary eco systems to explore which innovations can help to overcome challenges and create new opportunities.” Bannenberg is joined in conversation by Tanja Meissner, Head of Berlinale Pro.

Indian filmmaker Madhusree Dutta could not understand why her mother, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2015, would talk so much about tigers, even though she had never mentioned seeing one before her illness. But after hearing the story of the eponymous US Flying Tiger planes that were operational in the Himalayas during WW2, things began to fall into place for Dutta, at which point she was inspired to embark on a genre-defying study of memory, war and infrastructure. Dutta discusses her new film with BDE.

Patric Chiha’s inspiration for his new documentary, selected for Berlin Panorama, came in September 2022 when he first saw images of young Russians crossing the border in Georgia, fleeing the Putin regime. “They were facing a situation I could not imagine. Their faces seemed to say a lot about their fragility, and the violence of our world,” the director reflects to Business Doc Europe.

The short documentary The Devil Is Busy comprises a day in the life of Tracii, the head of security at a women's healthcare clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, who works tirelessly to protect the women who are forced to fight through protesters to receive their abortion care. “We wanted to take people through what it means to be in the positions of the staff, the women who are working in this clinic day in and day out, because they are really on the front line of what has turned into a battle,” co-director Gandbhir states. “With many of the protesters outside, it’s like a holy war.”

In Hungry, world-premiering February 2 in IFFR’s Harbour section, Austrian director Susanne Brandstaetter offers a sobering account of how, in the not-so-distant future, humankind has allowed itself to become extinct. With no humans left on Earth to explain exactly why this, it is left to an alien visitor to the planet to determine the food-related sequence of events, the “cause and effect” that led to our demise as a species. The filmmaker serves up the conclusions for Business Doc Europe.

A feast for the eyes and ears, the hybrid Krakatoa, presented both theatrically within IFFR’s Harbour section and as an installation within Art Directions, recreates the volcanic explosion of 1883 which resulted in the loudest sound ever heard. It is a film with contemporary resonance, within an ecological sense. “It’s a goal to rethink our position with the planet… we have to make a kind of sacrifice to nature in order to appease it, in order for it to become stable again, and establish an equilibrium.”

Reading through her teenage diaries reminded director Angelica Ruffier of a romantic obsession she once developed for her history teacher. That memory forms the basis of her new feature doc, selected for IFFR Tiger Competition. “The really difficult part was to read them now…” she tells BDE of a sense of shame she felt when she first looked back over the old notebooks. However, she soon realised that what she had written was, in fact, frank and accurate, a record of “pure” experience.

The Polish feature documentary Closure tells the most desperate of personal stories, that of a dad searching for his lost son. “This film became one of the most challenging I’ve made on every level, because it required holding two impulses at once,” says director Michał Marczak. “On the one hand, I wanted to keep the crew minimal and intimate. On the other hand, I wanted the film to carry an epic scope, to convey emotion through images and atmosphere, through showing rather than telling.”