Interviews

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.

David Borenstein talks to BDE about his extraordinary feature doc, co-directed with Pavel "Pasha" Talankin, a Russian teacher who secretly documents his small town school's transformation into a war recruitment center during the Ukraine invasion. “To see the road he has taken in the last year and a half, will I ever see something like that again in my life? I don’t know…it is dramatic! That has been a joy to me,” Borenstein marvels at how the softly spoken former teacher has transformed his life.

Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Ladkani’s Yanuni profiles the remarkable Juma Xipaia, an Indigenous leader from the Xipaya people in Brazil who, in her early 20s, became the first woman chief in the Middle Xingu region, and who has campaigned ferociously to protect her community in the Amazon from exploitation by miners, foresters and anyone else looking to pollute and destroy the ecosystem. “If we lose the Amazon, then we will all lose,” the director tells BDE.

Business Doc Europe talks to Liat Beinin Atzili, the eponymous subject of Brandon Kramer’s Oscar shorted-listed Holding Liat, which follows Liat’s family after her abduction during the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks. “It is possible for me as an individual to go through the experience that I went through but still believe in other people and believe that there can be kindness,” she tells BDE. “People can still hang on to their humanity even in very, very difficult situations.” Liat is joined in interview by the director.

Matt Alesevich and Hemal Trivedi’s short documentary focusses on the deeply personal relationship between Aney, a New York–based healthcare worker, and Farida, a wise and resilient teenager from an Indian nomadic tribe. “People say that there are three types of C that get funded, which are films about cult, crime, or celebrity,” co-director Trivedi tells BDE. “But there's a fourth C which people don't talk about, which is community. And our film is about building community.”

Mariska Hargitay’s Oscar-contending HBO-backed documentary is a deeply personal and clearly cathartic venture in which the filmmaker tries to make sense of her relationship with someone about whom she has only the most fleeting recollections - her mother, Jayne Mansfield. It was a film Hargitay made with the blessing of her siblings. “Not only did they trust me but, at the end, they all shared how healing and how cathartic it was for them. I told them I am making this movie for us,” she tells BDE.

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and an Oscar contender) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.

Third Act (which premiered in Sundance) is an intimate and loving portrait of Robert A. Nakamura, the pioneering Japanese-American filmmaker often called “The Godfather of Asian American film,” who died earlier this summer. “Initially, we set out just to make a simple biography of my dad, a portrait of an artist celebrating his achievements and career,” Tadashi Nakamura tells BDE. “But anyone could make that biopic. What is the film that only I could make, as his son, in that moment? That was an open-ended question and the challenge.”