Interviews

It is one of the most famous photos in history. In 1968, two days after the Tet Offensive, the South Vietnamese General Loan was photographed executing Captain Lēm of the invading Vietcong with a single shot to the head. “For the Vietnamese, it was really the definition of the civil war. It was a Vietnamese brother shooting another Vietnamese brother,” director Naja Pham Lockwood underlines to BDE of her short documentary On Healing Land, Birds Perch. “I wanted to tell the stories behind that photo.”

Producer George Chignell talks to Business Doc Europe about Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, an Oscar contender that was released in the US this autumn by Neon. Peck uses Orwell’s work, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, to look at the growth of authoritarianism today, everywhere from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russian, from Myanmar to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. “For me, it was a gift to work with a director like him,” Chignell says of her association with Peck.

“I struggled with addiction and depression for most of my young adult life,” filmmaker Ben Rekhi clarifies to BDE of one of his main motivations for making his Oscar-qualifying short, The Breakthrough Group. The 40-minute film looks in depth at the remarkable work of The Other Side Academy in Salt Lake City, a programme providing care and “tough love” for those at the lowest ebb of drug or alcohol dependency.

It may be a fiction film, but it is the first by a director acclaimed for her documentary output. What’s more, Kat Steppe’s Sunday Ninth, a story about Alzheimer’s and the vulnerability of memory, is set in a real operational care home. “This approach allows fiction to take a step further. Blending real people into the fictional storyline highlights the real-life story, and vice versa. This mix creates a powerful viewing experience that deeply connects with the audience,” the Flemish director underlines.

Christopher Radcliff’s short film We Were the Scenery is both tiny and epic in scale, as it tells the story of two Vietnamese war refugees, the parents of the film’s producer and writer Cathy Linh Che, who, after escaping to The Philippines, were drafted as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “Their VHS copy of the film sits on the shelf next to all their home video tapes,” says the director of Che’s parents now. “It's something that they use as a sort of tool for reminiscing in the same way that they do their home videos.”

Food Delivery, about the struggles of Filipino fishing folk, has won many plaudits, but is also facing down some heavy criticism – from the Chinese government. “I did not ask for this personally. Who would want to make a film that would go against a superpower like China?” director Baby Ruth Villarama reasons to BDE. “But where I was presented with the truth, the lived experience of our fisherfolk, the very people who are working in quiet dignity, and when I realised there are actual threats to our freedom and our food security, we had no choice but to embrace the story and to tell it as humanely as possible.”

The Tale of Silyan works on many levels. It tells the tale of an injured stork being nursed back to health by kindly farmer Nikola, while also highlighting the financial plight of the rural Macedonian farming communities. It is also a story of economic migration as Nikola’s wife, daughter and grandchild are forced to move to Germany. It furthermore recounts the myth of Silyan, a prodigal son who, after turning against his father, was turned into a stork. “This is a story I grew up with,” Kotevska tells BDE of Silyan’s punishment. “My grandparents told it to me while we were observing the storks as kids.”

In his documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world-premiered at Sundance 2025 and is now competing for the Feature Doc Academy Award, Charlie Shackleton ruminates both over his abandoned investigation into a notorious (and unsolved) murder as well as the limitations of the true crime genre. “It does increasingly feel that absolutely the only thing you can get made is true crime or celebrity documentary. And it feels really suffocating,” Shackleton laments to BDE.

The picturesque southern town of the Natchez may well conjure up grand, elegiac associations, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll discover the place’s shameful history. While many within the white community still invoke the spirit of Gone With The Wind, both in how they dress and how they conduct themselves, it is Rev, a Black preacher, who shows visitors to the town the devastating legacy of human exploitation. Director Suzannah Herbert discusses her film with Business Doc Europe.

Petra Costa’s documentary investigates the toxic link between evangelical Christianity and political governance within her home country of Brazil, most notably under the regime of Jair Bolsonaro. The Netflix doc presents the former-president as almost puppet-like in his devotion to the firebrand tele-evangelist Silas Malafaia. “We knew they had an intimate political relationship, but as we watched the material, it became so evident the kind of subservience and reverence that Bolsonaro had for Malafaia,” says Costa, who is joined in interview by producer Alessandra Orofino.