Interviews

Ukrainian director Yegor Troyanovsky discusses his urgent documentary about two female volunteer medics operating on the front line in the war against Russia. ““I hope audiences see Cuba and Alaska the women, not just the soldiers,” he says. “We worked hard to be accurate, to show their lives and perspectives without judgement. And I hope [people] can see the importance of the things our two participants do – that there is still joy of life in Ukraine.”

Ukrainian co-director Mila Teshaieva talks to BDE about her and Marcus Lenz’s return to the protagonists of their highly lauded 2022 documentary When Spring Came to Bucha. “I was trying as much as I could [to make] a film that would not only speak about the dark side,” she says. “At the same time, I think our film is very honest, strikingly, strikingly honest about those very normal lives touched by war and broken into pieces.”

In her analysis of a murder in a small close-knit Florida community, Geeta Gandbhir, who won the Directing Award for US documentary at Sundance 2025, presents a devastating critique of race, inequality and the vigilante-style ‘stand your ground’ legislation in operation in the US today. “The right to defend yourself…has been weaponised against black and brown people as a licence to kill,” she tells BDE of her Netflix doc.

“I think these are good times for documentaries as a genre, I'm very optimistic,” DocFest’s Raul Niño Zambrano tells BDE on the eve of the festival’s 32nd roll-out. “Yes, there is something specific in the current climate - with misinformation, with artificial intelligence, with fake news - but I think we are really playing a key role in shaping the landscape of what the discussions can be about. We are giving something necessary, but also something different.”

The song Agadoo was just about as bad as it gets, an opinion that many people also formed about Black Lace, the band that sang it. Frontman Dene Michael Betteridge has probably sung it more than 20,000 times, director Kim Hopkins tells BDE of the group’s willing subject of her touching new doc Still Pushing Pineapples, which opens the 32nd Sheffield DocFest. Would he appear in a warts-and-all account of his life, she asked him at the beginning of the process. Absolutely, was the answer. “I think he has the philosophy that all publicity is good publicity,” Hopkins says.

Ouvidor is a massive artist squat in Sao Paolo, whose residents are constantly under threat of eviction from a hostile local government. But ‘ouvidor’ is also a word that means ‘listener,’ which is what director Matias Borgström became as he chronicled preparations for the controversial art biennale that was planned for the establishment. “I like documentaries that, instead of speaking about things in the past, [show] what's happening in the present. So when the spectator who's watching the film is surprised by something that is happening, me, as the director, I'm also surprised,” Borgström tells BDE.

In The Age of Water, brother and sister Isabel & Alfredo Alcántara tell a story with true global resonance, how the over-extraction of groundwater to boost agricultural yields can disturb previously contained toxic chemicals, leading to the contamination of drinking water. This is what happened in the Mexican town of La Cantera, where three infants died of leukaemia, the result of lethal radioactive toxins in the water. But six local women decided to fight back… Co-director Isabel Alcántara discusses her urgent new film with BDE.

Vivian Schröder, Impact Director and co-founder of Dokumentale (Berlin), talks to BDE about the event’s second edition, running June 12 to 22. “We are celebrating humanity,” she says of her festival ethos. “We come together in a space as humans and we listen to each other and sometimes we need to become uncomfortable in uncomfortable conversations. These are the times that demand it, and we want to have a space for multiple perspectives and dialogue.”

Directors Mocanu and Dragolea follow charismatic environmental activist Tiberiu Boșutar as he tries to stop illegal (and highly lucrative) logging in Romania’s forests. “Our way of dealing with issues [in Romania] is a tragic-comical way,” says Dragolea. “We have a saying that you laugh and you cry…we didn’t search for the humour but the humour was just there for us to uncover with our camera.”

It’s 50 years now since the end of the Vietnam war. A still largely unchronicled aspect of the conflict is the plight of the “Amerasian” children born to Vietnamese mothers but abandoned by their American GI fathers. Sang, the subject of Weronika Mliczewska’s new doc Child Of Dust (sold by Rise and Shine and in competition at Krakow FF) is one of these lost souls. The director talks to BDE.