Interviews

When journalist Lina Vdovîi, estranged from her violent father, agrees to help him expose the injustices perpetrated by previous employer, the process reopens the wounds of their past relationship. Nevertheless the experience also proves to be cathartic. Making the film convinced her that “running away” from him wasn’t “healing the wounds from your past,” she tells BDE. She was, instead, giving herself a chance to make peace with him.

Yes, Gar O’Rourke did himself try the mud treatment when he was preparing his new feature doc Sanatorium (selected for Documentary Competition at KFF and sold by MetFilm Sales). He has also done the salt pools the electro-massages and everything else between. Many docs have been made in Ukraine since the invasion but this is surely the gentlest, funniest and most surprising. O’Rourke gets the full treatment from BDE.

The doc component of KFF Industry kicks off in earnest May 28 with the presentation of nine Polish ‘Docs to Go,’ These are films on the cusp of completion and roll-out to the international doc community. May 29 will see the presentation of 14 new doc projects, while the CEDOC market embraces docs from the wider CEE region. Industry Head Katarzyna Wilk fills in BDE on this year’s KFF professional sidebar.

On the eve of the 65th Krakow Film Festival (25 May to 1 June), outgoing director Krzysztof Gierat and Krakow Film Foundation president Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła sat down with Business Doc Europe to preview this year’s event and to reflect on Gierat’s 25 years at the helm. “Documentary filmmaking has changed radically, so much so that my own perception of it has changed,” he tells BDE of the ever-evolving doc sector.

Iga Lis’ feature doc profiles Miecia, the woman who runs the smokehouse in the Polish seaside town of Leba that provides, quite simply, the best fish that the director has ever tasted. Lis grew equally fond of the smokehouse owner and her staff. “I found it impossible not to form relationships with those people,” she tells BDE. “At a certain point, I found myself caring deeply about them - and they cared deeply about me.”

Swedish master Widerberg is on the verge of rediscovery and reappraisal. That is certainly the hope of renowned Swedish film critic Jon Asp and industry veteran Mattias Nohrborg (founder of arthouse distributor TriArt Film). “The relevance of the films today is fascinating,” Nohrborg tells Business Doc Europe. “His films seems so new and fresh and modern.”

French actress Romane Bohringer’s hybrid film is inspired by the book that French politician and MP Clémentine Autain wrote about her mother, the troubled French movie star Dominique Laffin. But the film began to take on a very personal dimension. At first, the director planned a conventional fictional adaptation. However, during the writing process, she kept on hearing her own story “knocking at the door,” she tells BDE.

When Raoul Peck was offered access to “everything by George Orwell,” not only the novels but also the diaries and letters of the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm, he couldn’t say no. “But then it is my job to find what is my angle, what is my organic approach to the subject and come up with something different as well,’ he tells BDE of his scorching new feature documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 which launched in the Cannes Premiere section earlier this week.

In his feature doc debut, the return of independently-minded Déni Oumar Pitsaev to his home in Chechnya causes a family feud. His relatives all want him to get married and to go by traditional Chechen codes of family and masculinity. This was not always easy to record on film. “Some things that were more rough, raw, emotional and private I did not include in the film because it was too personal and my father was too vulnerable,” the director tells BDE.

Dutch immersive doyenne Corine Meijers (Studio Biarritz) talks to Business Doc Europe about her Cannes selection Lacuna, which she produced together with fellow Dutch Ilya Kok of Copper Views Film Productions. In the VR, the elderly Sonja has no memory of the moment that saved her life - the separation from her parents in 1943 - but the discovery of three silver napkin determines the directors to prompt her more about her past…