Interviews

Dutch visual artist Jeroen Kooijmans discusses his debut feature doc which is both therapeutic and loving, and dedicated to fellow artist Elspeth Diederix, the 30-year+ love of his life, and the muse behind the film. “In the first three and a half years when I was starting this project, basically I wanted to make a portrait of her. I wanted to make a love letter for her as a surprise. I also didn't want to tell her because I was afraid she wouldn't like it, and would censor a lot of footage,” Kooijmans confides.

Filmmakers Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel spent seven years making their new feature documentary, an intimate epic set almost entirely within the confines of the ex-Kartli sanatorium in Tbilisi, Georgia, which became home to 200 displaced families. “We had this feeling of the building as a personality with its own character and mood,” Kalandadze says. “The key to understand how these people live, and what they do all day was also to study the building itself, all the stairs and balconies.”

Aiste Žegulytė has a fascination for change and decay…and mould. In her new documentary, world-premiering in Amsterdam, the director immerses herself in the world of these microscopic spore-producing structures. The film is particularly cinematic, both in terms of style and content. “It was important for me to create a metaphor of how mould eats our memories, our visual memory,” she tells Business Doc Europe. “So I was looking for mouldy tapes, and unexpectedly found some super beautifully mouldy archives from a documentary chronicle of my dad's hometown in Lithuania.”

Dutch director Nordin Lasfar dicusses his dynamic new documentary that chronicles the asymmetric relationship in Tangier between Paul Bowles and Mohammed Mrabet, two highly contrasting literary lions. “These were two people that were genuinely interested in each other, but found themselves in a neo-colonial system that wasn't fair,” Lasfar underlines. “Paul was part of the group where the power lies. And Mohammed was part of the group that was suppressed.”

In the Synthetic Sincerity lab, researchers are looking to inject authenticity into AI characters, using folk from Isaacs’ own documentaries to do so. In return, they allow Isaacs to film the process. The film may be hi-tech in concept, but decidedly low in budget. “I made this film for £8,000. There is something about the independence that gives you,” Isaacs tells BDE.

Isabel Arrate Fernandez talks to BDE about her first IDFA as Artistic Director. For her, the next 11 days are about more than audience numbers, box-office revenues and the number of Forum meetings. “IDFA is also about encounters, stepping out of your bubble, making unexpected connections,” she says. “We aim to create a meaningful experience for the audience and for the film professionals that attend.”

Dutch director Maasja Ooms discusses her new documentary, world-premiering at IDFA, about people who hear voices in their heads, and how psychiatric treatment is as much about talking to the voices as to the hosts. It is a film that is ripe for impact. “The beautiful thing is that the people in the film have a mission themselves,” says Ooms. “There's also a whole voice-hearers movement that wants to free itself, so we're going to connect with that and ride along.”

Director Diego Gutierrez and editor Albert Markus discuss their existentialist documentary that chronicles Gutierrez's’s return to his homeland to find answers to some of life’s fundamental questions. Mexico may be the location of the odyssey, but the themes are universal. ‘The sinking boat is the planet,” Gutierrez underlines. “Mexico, I think, is more of a metaphor for the world.”

When folk at Sundance 2025 went to see Ryan White’s new doc, grief and death were presented in a way they simply weren’t expecting…with bucket-loads of humour. Which is why the film won the Festival Favourite Award. Come See Me In The Good Light, which tells the story of how poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley confront Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis, was originally suggested to White by producer and comedian, Tig Notaro. “Tig said ‘Andrea is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known in my entire life,’” the director tells BDE, “and I think there’s this opportunity to subvert the typical terminal illness genre.’”

Back in 2023, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi screened his feature doc My Extinction at COP28 in Dubai. While there, he got his camera out to record his impressions, which he presents in the feature doc Colossal Wreck, which opens this weekend across the UK. “I thought, well, obviously, I have to go because it'll be interesting and fun,” he tells BDE. “Also, surely Dubai is going to be insanely dripping with visual irony with every image that surely will be a sort of metaphor for the state of play in the world at large…”