Interviews

“Chilean documentaries have managed to position themselves globally for their artistic quality, for raising universal issues with creative points of view and for their capacity for exploration that manages to awaken astonishment,” says Paula Ossandón, director of Chiledoc. Four Chilean docs-in-progress will be showcased May 19 in Cannes Docs while a dozen other Chilean documentaries will be represented by the non-fiction delegation at this year’s Cannes Marché.

The Austrian-produced Militantropos, made by Ukrainian filmmakers Smith, Gorlova and Mozgovyi, attempts to capture the human condition through the fractured realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is the first part of an eventual trilogy. “The first film [is] about the transformation of a human within the war. The second film will speak much more about death and how death influences society, and the third will be about the connection between the war in Ukraine and the world outside,” Gorlova tells BDE.

Guillermo F Florez pitched his feature doc Lord Take Me Soon as a Rough Cut in Barcelona in 2024. This year the finished work world-premieres in Official Selection. The film concerns 86-year-old Carmen - previously a nun and the taker of several lovers – who wanted to end her life through euthanasia. ““Thanks to Carmen’s personality, it’s mostly a life-affirming story, and a portrait of a Quixotesque woman who suffered the oppression of an extremely conservative society, especially of women,” Florez tells BDE.

The highly cinematic feature project Jaripeo offers a queer perspective on the titular jaripeo, a central Mexican style of rodeo known for its traditional cowboys and displays of machismo. “The film utilizes verité, Super-8 and abstracted sequences to walk the line between the real and the subconscious,” says co-director Efraín Mojica. “As a twinkly little kid, I didn't really fit into this macho of fantasy. As a teenager though, I mean, who doesn't like to see hot cowboys?”

The tousle-haired musical knight Sir Simon Rattle is the focus of Benedikt Schulte’s new documentary world-premiering May 16 in The Sound of Music section of DOK.fest Munich. And given that Rattle is the chief conductor of Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and has German citizenship, he’ll be there in person to see it. Director Schulte gets musical with BDE.

In her new feature documentary Only on Earth, selected for DocsBarcelona Official Competition, Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Instead, she is at the heart of the inferno. “We are actually inside those fires,” the director extinguishes any idea that she and her team were staying back as the heat rose. She explains more to BDE.

Enric Miralles was the visionary Barcelona-born architect whose commissions included the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh and the Igualada Cemetery, famous for the way it seems to merge into the landscape. He died of a brain tumour aged only 45. The fact that he had died young and was buried within his own architecture touched director Maria Mauti emotionally. “From that moment it seemed to me that his life and his work were inextricably linked,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

After premiering his feature debut Mañana Sol at DOK.fest Munich in 2024, prolific German producer/director Denis Pavlovic is now screening the film on the Doc Around Europe VOD platform. Additionally, he has three further works in the pipeline. As producer, The Mountain Has Fallen (director Thomas Oswald) competes for a DOK.composition Award at DOK.fest Munich 2025. As director/producer, Pavlovic is raising finance on the feature doc Hidden Lines: A Life with Scoliosis, optioned by SWR, and is further raising finance on the feature doc A Land That Time Forgot.

German production and sales maestro Heino Deckert was handed the 2025 Docs d’Honor Award during the opening ceremony of the 28th DocsBarcelona. The festival is screening two of his films, the Oscar-nominated Rabbit à la Berlin by Polish Bartosz Konopka, and Heimat is a Space in Time, the final film of Thomas Heise, who passed away in 2024. It is the film Deckert is most proud of. “When this film is shown even in 50 years time, people will understand the whole of the 20th Century when they watch it.”

In their film selected for DocsBarcelona Competition, Iranian filmmakers Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni chronicle the ebbs and flows in the life of their main protagonist, Sara Shahverdi, the motorcycling former midwife from a remote Iranian village who took the leap into local politics. “From the very beginning, we knew the motorcycle would be like an essential character in the film,” Khaki says, not least because it is a symbol of Sara’s freedom and her defiance.