Interviews

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.

Anne-Frédérique Widmann’s Shewit, produced by Luc Peter and Katia Monla, tells a very 21st century tale of migration, exile and perseverance. “We wanted to discover the changes in Shewit, who arrived in 2015 very weakened by her 3-year journey from Eritrea to Switzerland,” Peter tells BDE. “And who, little by little, gains self-confidence and becomes a fighter in the face of the administrative difficulties linked to her refugee status, and finally emancipates herself to become a free woman.”

Producer Louis Mataré tells Business Doc Europe about his work-in-progress Heat, shot in the Persian Gulf and directed by Jacqueline Zünd. “HEAT deals with one of the most pressing global challenges of our time,” he says. “Rather than relying on dystopian visions or didactic messaging, the film explores the sensory and emotional resonance of heat as both a physical state and a social metaphor.”

Director/producer Dea Gjinovci discusses her work-in-progress project, set for a Spring/Summer 2025 release. In the film, the director and her exiled father return to his childhood village to recreate his memories with the help of local villagers. “My film explores universal themes at the heart of many of today’s crises: exile, cultural erasure, intergenerational trauma caused by oppression, the loss of material heritage, impunity, and the search for truth,” Gjinovci tells BDE.

Welcome to Boca Chica, Texas. This is where Elon Musk has built his SpaceX launchpad. It’s also where Julien Elie went to make his new feature doc, Shifting Baselines. Alongside the footage of the space rockets, the documentary also includes imagery of nature. “Seeing those beautiful birds just flying by those rockets is really sad,” director Julien Elie tells BDE. “It is painful to see this. You wonder what we are doing now…it was a unique place, Boca Chica, but it is not anymore.”

For years, Indigenous American Al Moon had been contemplating attending one of the annual reunions of the soldiers he served alongside in Vietnam. He had kept on putting it off. When he finally decided to go, filmmakers Ingold & Vivianne Perelmuter accompanied him, documenting his journey. “He wanted it but he feared it as well…the journey way deeper than the destination somehow,” Perelmuter tells BDE.

It’s easy to be reminded of the Jabberwocky or the Snark (mythical creatures in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense stories) by the Mokélé-Mbembé, the so-called “dinosaur of the Congo” that French cryptozoologist Michel Ballot has spent so long searching for in the jungles of Cameroon. Marie Voignier has already made one film about his idiosyncratic quest. Now, she is back with another, Anamocot, a world premiere in VdR’s International Feature Competition this week.

There is more than a touch of the magical realist about the Swiss/Argentinian The World Upside Down, a hybrid doc in which uncertainty ensues after a mysterious light-ball is expelled from the chest of farmer Omar, and as two housekeepers little by little assume permanent residency over the beautiful house that the owners have all but abandoned. “We were always fascinated by these topics - and also by things that are still very unexplainable to us humans,” co-director Leon Schwitter tells Business Doc Europe.

If there is one country that is punching well above its weight in doc terms, it is Norway, which has seen huge recent success with the likes of 2024 Sundance winners Benjamin Ree (Ibelin) and Silje Evensmo Jacobsen (A New Kind of Wilderness) through to this year’s Oscar win for No Other Land (a minority co-production), and much more besides. In Nyon, the Norwegian Film Institute is partnering with VDR-Industry April 8 on a WiP programme of docs ready for launch onto the international circuit. NFI’s Elisabeth Aalmo guides BDE through her selection.

When the US Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed in 1982, the US Department of Energy came up with six potential sites where 70,000 metric tonnes of the highest-level nuclear waste could be buried. This was material that was going to be toxic for thousands of years - so not the stuff any American actually wanted in their backyard. Casey Carter’s new doc tells the story of what newscasters called "a competition no-one wants to win" - the one to become the permanent home of the country’s radioactive nuclear waste.