Interviews

Queer artist Ivo Dimchev is a showman, a provocateur and an amazing songwriter, but the prospect of being the focus of Kristina Nikolova’s feature doc wasn’t one that he relished at first. “Many times it was such a nightmare for me and Kristina to deal with it, especially when other people got involved,” he tells BDE. “[But] now it’s over, I have no other feelings than love and gratefulness. What we made is extremely precious to me.”

Slow and meditative, at times accompanied by a soundtrack both sinister and rasping, the the Ukrainian feature doc Divia presents an apocalyptic vision of nature destroyed by war. “It’s hard to put some emotions into words, because most of them are inside this project – it’s really personal, and it’s hard to realise how many natural resources have been destroyed, mined, or occupied by Russian military forces,” says director Dmytro Hreshko.

Nasmi, the youngest of three brothers, was born in Germany to Roma parents who had fled the war in Kosovo. Nevertheless he was ‘returned’ to a horrific IDP camp in Kosovo in 2009 - together with his mother and middle brother Sedat - after the German authorities tightened its asylum laws. Roma director Katalin Bársony chronicled Nasmi’s story over the next 15 years. “The film is not just about borders, identity papers, or policy failures, though all of those are part of the story,” she says. “At its core, this is a film about love, separation, and the enduring desire for home.”

“Damir Markovina shares his story without reservations,” Croatian producer Tamara Babun Zovko (Wolfgang & Dolly LLC) underlines to BDE of the CineLink Rough Cut presentation We Shall Live Together. In the film, thirty years after the war in the Balkans, two brothers urge their father - former Bosnian Socialist MP Roko Markovina - to return to the place they were exiled from, their divided hometown of Mostar, a city made up of hurt, trauma, and precious memories…

Croatian producer Oliver Sertić (Restarted) fills in BDE on Anton Mezulić’s debut feature Cordon, which follows footballer Nikola, the product of a mixed marriage and now approaching manhood, but who is all the while dealing with a chaotic past and an uncertain future. It is a “coming-of-age story of a young man from a small, godforsaken Croatian town that remains ethnically divided thirty years after the war,” says Sertić.

Dina Karaman and Evgeny Rodin have set their new hybrid documentary, selected as a Work-in-Progress in Sarajevo, in a psychiatric hospital within an unspecified location. “The project's hybrid and docufiction nature, coupled with the fact that it was shot in a difficult-to-access location and later narrated as not belonging to any specific geography, could appeal to audiences by moving it away from the documentary and towards fiction, or even a musical,” say the filmmakers.

In Jakob Krese’s new feature doc, three generations of a [former] Yugoslav family reflect on over half a century of upheaval, hope, destruction, and new beginnings. “The grandmother fought with the partisans against fascism while the mother - a remarkable poet, writer, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker - decided to support her friends during the siege of Sarajevo,” Slovenian producer Ivana Naceva tells BDE. “Now Jakob is passing this legacy on to his young daughter.”

Romanian filmmaker Laurentiu Garofeanu explains the importance of his feature doc project, pitched at CineLink 2025. In Lost and Found…, when a young Canadian woman, sold as an infant in post-Ceaușescu Romania, returns to reclaim her identity, she uncovers the machinery that trafficked the sister she never knew, one of 30,000 children “exported” for adoption. “The hidden history of Romania’s international adoptions is a wound that never healed, for the children sent abroad, the families left behind, and the country that let it happen,” the director tells BDE.

Producer Sonja Bozic discusses the CineLink project The Forbidden Aunt, in which Serbian star actress-turned-filmmaker Bojana Novaković uncovers dark family secrets and confronts her own past in “a darkly comedic, multi-generational portrait of women and trauma.” While the film will address a politically charged topic from a personal perspective, as seen through the lens of lived experience, “humour, soap opera re-enactments, and deeply human moments [will] make the film engaging and accessible,” Bozic tells Business Doc Europe.

In their new feature doc, world-premiering at Edinburgh FF and the only doc in competition, Swedish filmmakers Alexander Rynéus and Per Bifrost return to the sinking town of Malmberget, built on top of a huge iron mine. “I think we will always continue filming in Malmberget in one way or another. I think it’s some kind of life calling,” Bifrost says of the magnetic pull of the disappearing town.