Interviews

UK director Louise Lockwood discusses her new feature doc Bel, which closes EIFF on August 19 and which profiles the prodigiously talented Kenyan-Scottish artist-musician-singer Beldina Odenyo who took her own life in 2021. “What an utter tragedy that that talent has been stopped. It’s obviously heart-breaking for the family, a human loss, but that raw, raw talent was totally the same. Bel and Amy [Winehouse] were very similar in that respect,” Lockwood tells BDE.

Dublin-based former Yugoslavian filmmaker Dragana Jurišić talks to Business Doc Europe about her debut documentary, a film both joyous and heart-rending, which tells the stories of maverick filmmaker Hari Džekson, a director of westerns, and his home town of Bijeljina, where the war in Bosnia started in 1992. In the feature doc, Jurišić also sets out to create her own western in the style of Hari. “When we were filming, everyone came together - Serbs, Roma, Muslims, Croats. It was such a joyful happy atmosphere, and there was absolutely no reason why these people shouldn't be friends - except for these man-made identity structures that are imposed on them.”

In his new feature doc, world-premiering in Sarajevo, Damir Markovina urges his father, politician Roko Markovina, both to return to the Bosnian city of Mostar from which he exiled himself over 30 years ago, and to acknowledge the repercussions of the personal and political choices and decisions he took back then. “If you don't deal with a problem, your children will have to deal with it, in one way or another,” the director tells BDE.

Dutch producer Renko Douze discusses Ukrainian Helena Maksyom’s feature doc Don't Ask Me If I Killed, sold by Esther van Messel’s First Hand Films, that chronicles the director’s life as a soldier in defence of her country. “It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and a very human perspective on the frontline,” Douze says of the film, receiving its International Premiere in Sarajevo Documentary Competition.

In her new feature doc, world-premiering at Sarajevo FF, Dutch-based Croatian director Tatjana Bozic discusses the business of loneliness, and being a stranger in a strange land. “It explores the loss of roots, community, and identity through the lens of migration and motherhood. As I discovered while making the film, the feeling of not belonging often begins long before we cross borders, it starts within our own families.”

Jordanian Asmahan Bkerat’s feature doc debut tells of the Afro-Palestinian-Bedouin Najar family living on agricultural land on the outskirts of Amman, the Jordan capital, whose bucolic yet fragile existence is severely threatened by plans to construct modern villas in their immediate vicinity. “I wasn’t a filmmaker before meeting the Najars,” says Bkerat. “This film was born out of the threat they faced, the brutality and destruction of the land, a threat that compelled me to pick up a camera, to document what was left of it and them.”

Polish director Kamila Serwicka discusses her intensely personal debut documentary, telling how a family of women escape and survive years of domestic abuse. “This film is my companion through our transformation. I want to show the power that rises when women unite, to give hope and courage to those who are still silenced,” Serwicka tells Business Doc Europe.

Palestinian Mohanad Yaqubi discusses his latest feature documentary, which he describes as a letter to the late revolutionary Lebanese documentary director Jocelyne Saab, and in which he reframes much of the work she made between 1973 and 1983. “I'm not able to do armed struggle. I'm not able to do political work. I'm not able to do social work. I'm not a doctor. I'm nothing. The only contribution I can make is to save some of these films for the next generations,” Yaqubi explains to BDE the sense of duty he feels as a filmmaker.

Filmed over 25 years, Magnum photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s feature documentary, sold by Autlook, follows Guille and Belinda, two inseparable cousins growing up on neighbouring farms in Argentina’s Pampas. "To me, they were just the centre of the universe - and I think that comes through in the work too. If you stop and pay attention to the smallest things, you can make them the centre of the world.” the director tells BDE of her feature debut, world-premiering in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present Competition.

Ukrainian soldiers Shakhta, Potter and Dancer have a very close relationship with death, having returned to the front-line after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “People at war accept [the possibility of] their own death and it really changes you,” Hontaruk elaborates to BDE on the title of her feature documentary, selected for Karlovy Vary. “This transformation is really important and powerful inside a person. It is a key to this film. You need to find your desire to live - and life is stronger than death.”