Interviews

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.

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.