Interviews

World-premiering in Utrecht, Joeri Pruys’s Final Cut looks at how the provocative TV show Body Art, made by Pruys’s father in the 1970s and starring the then little-known Serbian artist Marina Abramović, turned into one of the most notorious cases in the history of Dutch censorship. “The rules around who is actually the owner of this material are very vague,” Pruys tells BDE. “That is why in the film I am also saying it is my heritage, so I should be able to do with it whatever I want, because my father created this. It’s Marina’s work as well, so she should be free to use it.”

Ahead of the 15th Finnish Film Affair, running September 23 to 25, Head of Industry Lydia Taylerson answers questions posed by Business Doc Europe. During the event, eight documentary feature projects will be pitched to the professionals in attendance. “In all honesty, I think Finland's unique selling point is the lack of hierarchy within the film industry here,” Taylerson says. “Anyone who attends Finnish Film Affair also feels that. You can be a producer just starting out in your career, and over morning coffee be chatting with senior programmers of Tribeca or SXSW.”

Oscar-winning US director Alex Gibney talks to Business Doc Europe ahead of the September 30 UK release of Knife, about the shocking onstage attack on Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022. “He comes out of all of this learning all sorts of life lessons and not being mired in bitterness, resentment and hate,” Gibney observes of Rushdie. “He was certainly haunted and debilitated mentally by the attack, and he had to get that strength back. The only way he knew to do it was to push through.”

The industry programme of Nordisk Panorama kicks off in earnest this weekend, heralding 5 days of intense pitching, deal-making, networking and debate in the Swedish city of Malmö. The Forum runs 20-22 September, while the market kicks off September 18. As healthy as the Nordic doc industries are, NP’s Lea Maria Strandbæk Sørensen underlines to BDE how its professionals must look beyond their regional partners to ply their trade. “No-one is served by being self-sustained within the bubble, never looking out, and never collaborating with anyone else," she stresses.

Afsaneh Salari’s new feature documentary Tehran, Under the Skin scrapes away at a side of Iranian life you won’t see in many other documentaries, namely the booming world of cosmetic surgery. Thousands of Iranian women every year are heading to surgeries to get noses sculpted, stomachs tucked, breasts lifted or skin tightened. The film, sold by CAT&Docs, has its world premiere in TIFF Lightbox this weekend. Director Salari talks to BDE.

In Letters from the Silenced Country, exiled Belarusian director Andrei Kutsila, now living in Poland, combines archives, found footage and animation, as well as testimonies derived from letters written behind prison walls, to deliver a searing indictment of the regime that governs the country was forced to leave. “I only hope that this film will offer the international audience this opportunity to understand better our society, what is going on now, in my country.”

In a film that has as many plot twists as any fictional movie, a kidnapping at sea splits a Yemeni family apart, as a mother’s fight for survival reveals the human cost of Europe’s border regime. Director Sine Plambech emphasises to BDE that this is “not an activist film… I see it as an artistic documentation of a human rights violation - but definitely I want people to watch it and say ‘is this a good idea, to continue to outsource the border responsibilities to countries with conflicts and war and militia and weapons? Does that live up to our European values?”

Paris-based Italian director Giuseppe Schillaci talks to Business Doc Europe about his new feature documentary, world-premiering in Venice, which recalls a period in the 1980s when a programme of regenerative investment in a run-down Paris housing estate led to a glorious spike in community empowerment and connection. It was “an intimate yet collective moment of solidarity and social transformation - before the banlieues went up in flames,” he says.

Director Victor Kossakovsky and botanist Stefano Mancuso take viewers on an unprecedented journey into the life of trees. As Kossakovsky tells BDE, when he was three or four years old, growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, he was shown a leaf by his mother. She explained how trees are highly complex and sensitive organisms. “It is my first memory of myself,” Kossakovsky tells BDE of this early nature lesson.

In his new 3D feature doc, Wim Wenders profiles the work of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The parallels between architecture and filmmaking are obvious, points out Wenders, who works in a similar way to his illustrious subject. A house, he believes, “is a story,” and in a film, each shot can be regarded as “a brick in time” out of which scenes and then entire movies are built. “I don’t think the movie is remotely there when you have a script. Actually, I don’t think it is there at all. It is only in the shooting process that the film takes shape,” he adds.