Interviews

The Pluto Film boss is in Berlin with Circusboy in Generation, and two doc projects at EFM; The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe and The Underground Railroad, made by friends and fellow filmmakers, Martijn Blekendaal and Finbarr Wilbrink. Cölle tells BDE that she is looking to board documentaries as well as dramas at an earlier stage, with the “possibility to co-produce, to get into the funding [of documentary] and to offer a way to be part of the financial structure of projects.”

In his debut documentary world-premiering in Berlin, Paraguayan Juanjo Pereira takes on a historical subject about which he could find very little archive at home , the dictatorship of Paraguayan General Alfredo Stroessner, who was finally toppled in 1989. His solution was to cast around the rest of the world - and to see how the Stroessner years were portrayed by foreign media outlets. Director Pereira talks to Business Doc Europe.

In their short film world-premiering at Berlinale 2025, Daniel Azadi Faezi and Mila Zhluktenko find links between the construction of Munich’s Olympic shopping mall, a horrific racist attack that was perpetrated there half a century later, and a little-seen (but soon to be restored) protest film by Sohrab Shahid Saless, Iranian by birth but considered part of the German New Wave of the 1970s and 80s. The directors talk to BDE about their own film’s contemporary relevance.

It’s the worst form of mental torture you can imagine - your child held hostage and very little you can do to free her. This was the predicament of the parents of Liat Beinin Atzili, kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 2023 along with her husband, Aviv. The story of how Yehuda and Chaya coped, and how they worked tirelessly to liberate their daughter, is told in Brandon Kramer’s feature documentary Holding Liat, a world premiere February 16 in Berlin. The director talks to BDE.

In her new feature doc, world-premiering in Berlin, Luzia Schmid profiles the extraordinary German actress, singer, author and femme fatale Hildegard Knef, a woman of immense contradictions, but who, despite having worked with the greatest movie directors of the era such as Billy Wilder to Carol Reed, made few truly memorable films. “I instantly fell in love with her because I felt that nobody in Germany would talk so freely and so charmingly about things not working out well,” says director Schmid.

Lviv in western Ukraine was Vitaly Mansky’s home town, before he left as a young man to study film in Moscow. When filming his Ukrainian protagonists, some of whom were gravediggers and members of a brass band who play at funerals, Mansky was wary how families who had lost their loved ones at the hands of the Russian army might react toward him. After a funeral, one of the fathers came up to him. He was frightened about what the man might do, but in the end the father thanked him “for being on our side.”

In her new feature documentary Only on Earth (premiering in Berlin’s Generation Kplus and sold by Autlook), Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Not a bit of it - rather, 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.

It may have been shunned by Norwegian television executives (male) back in the 1970s and subsequently shelved for nigh on 50 years, but Vibeke Løkkeberg’s chronicle of the first International Women’s Film Seminar at Arsenal Cinema in Berlin, in 1973, still packs a political punch in offering up a timeless reflection on gender equality (or lack thereof) and representation. The director explains all to Business Doc Europe.

Business Doc Europe caught up with Paula Ossandón Cabrera, Director of Chiledoc. During our chat we zoomed in on a recent survey published by the body highlighting the Southern American country’s thriving non-fiction scene, areas for improvement, co-productions, nurturing talents and, of course, Chile’s presence at this year’s Berlinale and EFM.

Berlin-based Irish filmmaker Feargal Ward discusses his new short film, world-premiering in Berlin. Tin City was a fake town where, some 30 or 40 years ago, the British army played out war-game scenarios against the IRA, as represented by plastic mannequins and 2D cut-outs. “The crucial thing for me was the idea of a war taking place between two entities (the IRA and the British army), but on a third site, not in Britain, not in Ireland, but transplanted to north-west Germany,” says director Ward.