Interviews

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the framework for his film One to One: John & Yoko. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells Business Doc Europe of his scorching feature doc Orwell: 2+2=5, a strong awards contender.

Dutch interactive doyenne Corine Meijers enjoyed a very busy IDFA DocLab that saw two of her productions in Competition, and a third which was up for grabs during Forum. Meijers is an avowed fan of co-pro, she tells BDE. “I don't know how to do it otherwise. It is nice that we have basic funding in the Netherlands for immersive projects. But the kind of projects I make, with the basic funding that there is, it’s quite hard to do it at that level, so I have to reach out.”

Director Eugene Jarecki, Stella Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson reflect on Jarecki’s documentary which analyses the treatment meted out to journalist and whistle-blower Julian Assange by numerous governments, including those of the UK and US. “I think there is a story here that is so explosive for the public, so revealing and so much about today, that there is going to be a massive appetite for it.” Jarecki says of his film, which won a special jury prize at Cannes 2025, and is now an awards front-runner.

Using footage shot by inmates themselves on cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman show how squalor, violence and degradation have become commonplace in American jails. At the heart of the documentary is Robert Earl, a long-term prisoner with little chance of parole who has become a leader and spokesperson for the other inmates. “I do feel when we talk to him, it’s as if we are talking to Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben island,” Jarecki tells BDE of their campaigning doc.

Six years ago, Susana de Sousa Dias (IDFA’s Guest of Honour in 2025) first started research into the so-called “ghost town” left behind when Henry Ford’s rubber factory in the Brazilian Amazon closed down in the early 20th Century. Fordlândia Panacea is her second film on the subject. There is a familiar narrative about Fordlândia, as the haunted utopia that Henry Ford left behind. De Sousa Dias believes this is a crudely reductive vision of a place that has a far more complex history. “It was neither a Utopian project, and nor is it a ghost town,” the director insists to BDE.

Silent Flood, which has just won the Best Cinematography Award in IDFA International Competition, and is sold by Filmotor, isn’t a film in a hurry. Ukrainian Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk is telling the story of a closed religious community based in rural west Ukraine. Life is quiet and peaceful - or at least would be if it weren’t for the constant floods and the wars that have bedevilled the area. And then came the full-scale Russian invasion…The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Ethiopian-Israeli Mazal Tazazo survived the Nova festival massacre in southern Israel on October 7 2023 in circumstances that seem close to miraculous. Her story is told in This is NOT a Movie Script, a short film screening online this week as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival. Made by London-based Joëlle Bentolila at Chimaera Films, it is intended as the first in a series of stories that will be put together in feature documentary form. Bentolila talks to Business Doc Europe.

Iraqi filmmaker Zahraa Ghandour has never forgotten the sudden disappearance of her 10-year old friend, Nour. That incident has gnawed away at her for years, even as she has become a very successful filmmaker, producer and actor. She returns to the incident in her haunting debut feature-length documentary, Flana, whose title is Iraqi slang for a forgotten woman - and that’s precisely what Nour was to become. Ghandour discusses her film with BDE.

The Russian filmmaker discusses Trillion, his new and critically lauded documentary, and the second film in his ‘empathy’ trilogy, with Business Doc Europe. The film features, throughout, a mysterious woman who walks barefoot across the coastal terrain, again and again casting a very particular essence into the sea. “From the second I met her, I thought what she does is extraordinary,” Kossakovsky says of the woman whose identity he still refuses to disclose.