Interviews

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.

German neuropsychiatrist Dr Johann Spittler, a man who seems both wise and compassionate, bears an enormous responsibility in assessing the decision-making capacity of individuals seeking assisted suicide. As a qualified doctor, he can also assist in their subsequent passing which, as we see in Pavel Cuzuioc’s Green Light, can be highly problematic. “[But] I'm convinced that this right of getting assisted is something every person should have,” Cuzuioc tells BDE before the film’s world premiere in Locarno. “It's not the state - or the law - that should forbid you that.”

Finnish directors Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas discuss their new documentary, world-premiering at the leading Swiss festival. In the film, dancer/choreographer Sibiry is caught in an existential no-man’s land between Finland, where he feels like an outsider, and the Burkina Faso village of his youth, where he has now acquired the status of privileged European. “Our aim has been to craft a multidimensional film in aesthetics...reflecting the internal experience of a migrant that has his mind constantly divided between two very contrasting realities.”

Guinean teenager Fanta is the acrobatic star of Marjolijn Prins’ feature debut, which world-premieres August 11 in Locarno Kids Screenings. Produced by Ellen De Waele and Mirna Everhard of Serendipity Films (Belgium), the film follows the girl as she seeks a place, together with her best friend Makhissa, within the world-renowned Amoukanama Circus. “Fanta’s discipline, openness, and drive to become an acrobat stood out immediately,” the director observes. “As I spent time with her, I saw the potential for a nuanced film about empowerment.”

Swiss filmmaker Antshi von Moos discusses her feature documentary, world-premiering in Locarno, in which she explores the hyper-complex, borderline magical, connections between plants, insects and humans. The flying scents of the title are the volatile organic compounds used by plants and microbial organisms for communication (or, to put it scientifically, chemical signalling). “I wanted to make the plants perceptible as living beings,” Von Moos tells BDE. “And I wanted to find ways not to just talk about the plants, but also to make their hidden worlds tangible visually and also acoustically.”

Italian filmmaker Parsifal Reparato’s new feature doc She (sold by CAT&Docs and premiering in Locarno’s Critics Week) exposes the shameful exploitation of women workers in Vietnam’s booming electronics industry. One irony noted by Reparato is that Vietnam is generally viewed as a dictatorship, under the one-party control of the Communists. Yet, when it comes to personal freedom, “the biggest problem is from the corporates,” he tells BDE.

The last penal colonies in Europe are in Sardinia, as evidenced in the Locarno selection Nella Colonia Penale, directed by Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia and Alberto Diana. The film was shot by female DOP Federica Ortu. “It was something also that was interesting, to have the cinematography led by a woman cinematographer inside a so-deep masculine world. I think it gives something more to the film,” co-director Diana reflects.

Folk music has held a deeply ambivalent place within Irish culture over the last 100 years, since the end of British colonial rule. As Dennis Harvey and Lars Loven point out early on in their feature doc Celtic Utopia (a world premiere in Locarno’s critics' week), it has come to "incarnate the contradictions of the island: rebellion, conservative Catholicism, nostalgia for a future unrealised.” The directors get musical with BDE.