Interviews

Ahead of the July 12 world premiere of his feature doc Click the Link Below (Doc Edge NZ), Norwegian filmmaker Audun Amundsen announced that he has commenced photography on a “breathtaking” new sailing doc (working title: Aleutian Dreams) which will follow two families, including Amundsen’s own, as they prepare for a daring voyage through one of the world’s most remote & visually stunning maritime regions.

Dutch filmmaker wendelien van oldenborgh discusses her provocative new short film about transgenerational protest, selected for FID Marseille 2025. Each of the characters embodies defiance in their own way, whether elaborately, or with a greater degree of reflection. “In struggles, as in solidarity, although we look for our roles to play, we can also be there as an anonymous self,” the director tells us in her film.

In Action Item, Berlin-based Slovak director Paula Ďurinová addresses the subject of personal burnout and depression, shifting away from personal reflection to collective analysis. The film, selected for both Karlovy Vary Proxima and FID Marseille International Competition, affirms that 21st Century anxiety is a result of the systemic conditions in which we are forced to live and operate. This recognition can, conversely, serve as a springboard for justifiable anger, resistance and change. Ďurinová gets angry with Business Doc Europe.

In his new film, Norwegian Audun Amundsen immerses himself in the murky world of money-making online gurus. Click The Link Below, a premiere at New Zealand’s Doc Edge and sold by Sideways Film, profiles some of these internet marketeers who promise immense and instant wealth and success to those who buy their often eye-wateringly expensive online courses. Amundsen explains more to BDE.

In Garry Keane’s latest film, world-premiering July 4 at Doc Edge New Zealand, we meet three Deaf couples, all Irish, who navigate their challenging lives with strength and resilience, using the medium of Irish sign language. “Telling stories through sign language is challenging, but making this unique film was profoundly moving and creatively stimulating,” says Keane, who led a largely Deaf crew in the film’s realisation.

Daan Veldhuizen discusses his urgent new documentary, receiving its international premiere in the festival’s Edge of Impact category, about how, after after transferring control of their former colony West Papua to Indonesia in 1962, the Dutch set in motion years of genocidal violence against the West Papuan people. “I’ve always felt that Dutch culture is not completely honest about its own role in the world and about its historical relevance,” Veldhuizen comments.

In the Guatemalan barrio of Ciudad Peronia, sisters Lesli and Lupe organise a spectacular comparsa, or street festival, to remember the 41 girls who burned to death in 2017 in a so-called ‘safe home,’ and to protest at the unacceptable levels of femicide, rape and sexual abuse in the country. “It aligned with the kind of storytelling we wanted to do, that was character-centred and about how real people make real change in their community without waiting for the system to change or without waiting for permission,” co-director Vickie Curtis tells BDE.

In her feature doc debut, UK director Jessi Gutch talks to folk in her new home town of Folkestone, which overwhelmingly voted for Brexit in 2016, about the business of identity and what it means to be British. Or perhaps more accurately, what does it mean to be English? “I wanted to just talk to people and not make this into a kind of hero-villain thing. I was going to go into this more open-minded with people, starting from a place of compassion rather than starting from a place of judgement,” she tells BDE.

In Indian Bipuljit Basu’s remarkable debut feature we meet a Kolkata-based troupe of sex workers and their children, who are driving change through CAM ON, their self-run creative community that makes dynamic films about their lives. “I wouldn't have become a filmmaker if I had not met this wonderful community,” says the self-taught Basu. “Over the past five years they shaped me as a filmmaker, awakened my emotion as a filmmaker, and they helped me to grow as a human being…Trusting their collective intelligence made this film possible.”

When he read a newspaper article in 2018 about matchmaking between North Korean refugee women and South Korean men, Norwegian Morten Traavik was immediately fascinated. “[But] being very much of an outsider linguistically, culturally, I needed somebody who could be the bridge to the subject of the film; someone not only bilingual but with a built-in cultural understanding of both worlds,” he explains to BDE as to why he turned to his eventual co-director Sun Kim.