Interviews

“There are three kinds of people, the living, the dead, and those that go to sea,” wrote Aristotle over two millennia ago. As evidenced within Virginia Tangvald’s highly personal and tragic feature doc Ghosts by the Sea, the siren call remains as clear and dangerous as ever. As is the sea's tendency to intoxicate or instil a sense of madness in those who dedicate their lives to sailing on its turbulent surface. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe. (Canadian Spectrum)

The famous 1923 children’s novel, King Matt the First by Janusz Korczak, was a book that director Jaśmina Wójcik hated as a little girl. But during the pandemic, her two young daughters became huge fans of it. The strange sense of isolation felt by the young king in the book chimed with what children across Poland were feeling during lockdown. “Nature gave them this opportunity to have space,” the director tells BDE of the new feelings of liberation that Zoja and Lea were experiencing.

Hot on the heels of a very busy Visions du Réel, NFB (National Film Board of Canada) attends its home festival of Hot Docs with six new films, five of which are world premieres. Distribution, Marketing and Communications topper Nathalie Bourdon talks to BDE about the appeal of Canadian doc output. “First of all, our stories and our documentaries are always best quality, that's for sure. Because we take the time to do things well, the industry and audience know that the directors won't be muzzled. They [our filmmakers] tell their story the way they want to tell it.”

Concealed within the foundations of Julietta Singh’s childhood home in Manitoba are the stories of women who have lived there in previous times and who have, over many years, confronted colonialism, racism, sexism and ableism. “It [the house] was a repository of some very difficult experiences and memories for our family,” co-director Singh, whose The Nest world-premieres at Hot Docs, tells BDE.

Throughout its 96-minute running time, Noam Gonick’s feature doc touches on everything from the persecution and marginalisation of gays and lesbians in the Canada of the 1950s and 1960s to Black Lives Matter and the emergence of the “two spirit” movement among gay Indigenous communities. Featuring a treasure trove of archival material, the film also “takes advantage in a gracious way” of Canada’s rich history of activist filmmaking, the director tells BDE. “We wanted to get their material back out there on screen.”

UK producer Roy Boulter talks to BDE about directing his debut feature Algorithm Party, an adaptation of the book of the same name, in which fiery Liverpool author and spoken word performer “Roy” (real name PJ Smith, and no relation to Boulter) narrates a series of raw, scabrously funny and sometimes very violent tales dealing with drugs, alcohol and domestic abuse - partly drawn from his own experiences growing up in Toxteth.

Lulu Scott’s new feature doc Where Two Oceans Meet (a world premiere in Nyon) looks very closely at the life of a family in Mitchells Plain, a township not far from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Kulsum Orrie and her two children are waiting patiently for the release of her husband, Phadiel, who is serving a 25-year prison sentence. 30 years after the end of the Apartheid, Kulsum is still enduring her own separation. Director Scott talks to BDE.

Roland Edzard’s new documentary, world-premiering in Nyon, takes us into the heart of the Central Sahara Gold Rush. The director asks his characters to re-enact their own story. “The movie in itself is a documentary because it is real people in a real situation and it’s real life,” he tells BDE. “But it’s a documentary that I did like fiction…I didn’t want to explain but to be inside [the story]. I can say it is done like a fiction [film] because I say ‘action’ and I say ‘cut.’”

“I wouldn’t say it was exactly a carte blanche, but it was close to it,” Montreal-based director Sophie Bédard Marcotte says of the freedom given to her by backers National Film Board of Canada when she embarked on I Lost Sight Of The Landscape (a world premiere in Burning Lights at VdR this week). In the film, Marcotte turns her camera on her playwright neighbour as he develops his latest work within an artist co-operative.

In Benjamin Bucher’s debut feature, Joyce, a 22-year-old African-Chinese dancer, tries to find her way in Europe – torn between artistic and identity-related self-discovery and the financial dependence on her mother’s TikTok business. “The film deals with universal themes that many of us can relate to, such as the search for independence, migration and globalisation, identity and the attempt to preserve real moments in an increasingly staged world,” producer Olivier Zobrist tells BDE.