Interviews

In his new doc series, the first part of which world-premieres in Sundance Episodic, Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard chronicles the decade-long legal battle between the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier and the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev over the enormous mark-ups that Bouvier applied to the sales. “I trust neither of them and never trusted them. They play a billion-dollar game that complicates things for everyone,” Dalsgaard tells BDE.

For 10 years, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes followed Isra’a and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, as they were forced to navigate war, exile and emotional anguish. As we see in the film, selected for Sundance World Documentary Competition, characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” co-director MacInnes tells Business Doc Europe.

The first major doc fest of the year, and screening over 150 films from 35 countries, the 8th edition of Biarritz-based FIPADOC kicks off January 23, running to January 31. Additionally, Industry Days, a key event in the local and international doc calendar will see a gathering of France’s foremost docmakers, producers, broadcasters and industry professionals. FIPADOC boss Christine Camdessus discusses her festival’s offer, both for public and professionals, with BDE.

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.