Interviews

In 1919, the flamboyant, some say narcissistic, politician Gabriele D’Annunzio staged a coup in the Croatian port town of Rijeka, and thereafter ruled for 16 months. In his new film, Igor Bezinović tells the story of this tumultuous period via archive and recreations staged with local people, with a variety of amateur actors playing D’Annunzio. “To tackle D’Annunzio’s madness, you have to be as passionate about it [the story] as him,” Bezinović tells BDE.

Rotterdam-based filmmaker Sara Rajaei’s City of Poets is a short hybrid work that reflects on the countless inequities suffered by women. It is a film both deeply melancholic and shot through with a magical realist aesthetic. “At the same time the film is addressing something real - something of our contemporary history and things that I experienced during my childhood and that I still experience. So yes, it is a fairy-tale, but it is about something much larger, much more universal.”

In Active Vocabulary, Russian teacher Maria is denounced after she criticizes, in class, the Russian War in Ukraine. After fleeing the country for Germany, she ingeniously sets out to re-enact the incident with pupils in her new Berlin class. “This village where Maria comes from is so remote from the front lines, so far away, and yet there is apparently this very strong ideological presence of the state that made them [her former pupils] behave this way, or is setting the rules.”

Top archive producer and footage researcher Elizabeth Klinck fills in Business Doc Europe on this year’s DOK Archive Market, to be held October 30. “It’s wonderful to have both private and public/commercial archives altogether under one roof,” she underlines how the market has become a must-attend event for the sector. “I think DOK Leipzig is right up there and I am always so impressed by the quality of the programming that GRAP (German Researchers and Archive Producers Association) puts together from within their membership base.”

For Intersection, Karoline Rößler designed a computer game that reveals the levels of discrimination that certain players face. It’s a game designed to be unfair. In the documentary, six protagonists who’ve faced discrimination because of their sexuality, ethnicity or disability, are interviewed individually and take part in a round-table discussion. “I just researched a lot of people who felt were like-minded about the topics I want to stand for, and that I wanted this film to speak about,” the director tells BDE.

Ron Rothschild’s A Jewish Problem probes into very uncomfortable areas both in his family’s history, and that of the state of Israel. Its central figure is his grandmother, Ruth, whom he interviewed at length before she died. “She was a complex figure. She was involved in actions that are morally dubious and she is testifying about this,” Rothschild tells BDE. “I myself had the same kind of history. I am not in the position to judge her.”

Without silver, the 21st Century would be unrecognisable, such is its ubiquitous use across tech - from phones to electronics to AI. But it’s also the cause both of widespread exploitation and many deaths within the mines where it is sourced. In her feature doc, Natalia Koniarz follows the Indigenous folk of Potosi, Bolivia, who have worked these mines for 500 years. “Over 8 million people are believed to have died here since silver was discovered in 1545,” she tells BDE. “They were enslaved. They were forced.”

In Trumpian America, there are still small corners where an old-fashioned sense of community still prevails. One such place is Lumpkin, in Stewart County, Georgia, where there is a hardware store run by the very affable Kellie. Her shop is a bastion of good-natured tolerance. As for their film’s selection for Leipzig, the filmmakers speculate to BDE that one of the reasons may be that “in times of ultra-crazy political divisions,” it shows people simply “getting along.”

In The Beauty of the Donkey, which has its international premiere at Ji.hlava 2025, director Dea Gjinovci and her exiled father return to his razed village in Kosovo to recreate his childhood memories, alongside local townsfolk. “My film contemplates the traces left behind and asks: can they be woven back together? Often, what remains are the memories of those who survive—and how they pass them on,” Gjinovci tells BDE.

Chilean artist/filmmaker Meliza Luna Venegas’ Green Desert (screening in the International Competition at DOK Leipzig) is both a climate change movie and an intensely personal and poetic journey into the director’s own past, and that of her family. “For me, the film is a journey through time,” the director tells BDE. “A lot of the archive is used to help remember the culture of the people who lived on this land and of the forests that don’t exist anymore.” Venegas is joined in interview by producer Isabel Orellana Guarello.