Interviews

Filmmakers Vasarhelyi and Chin discuss their audacious new feature doc in which mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson plan to climb, together with Chin, the North Face of Mount Everest, before skiing back down the way they came. “You can shape and define your fate to a certain degree. We all think that as humans we get to decide everything. We don’t,” Chin tells BDE. “There is only so much you can control…”

Sophie Fiennes is back with her latest Pervert’s Guide, once again made with the maverick Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and movie lover, Slavoj Zizek. “I think the absurd is something he embraces,” Fiennes says of Zizek’s freewheeling approach. “It’s a reflection of him being a person who is an outsider, a free thinker - and the deadpan comedy of it is particular to him. I never know what is going to happen when I put him in those situations. I have no idea. It’s an experiment.”

Filmmakers Juan Francisco Donoso and Aline Juaréz discuss their urgent new feature documentary, about the existential struggle of two communities on either side of the globe against lithium extraction, and the far-reaching ambitions of one of the world’s largest mining corporations. “We feel immense relief and proud that we overcame significant hurdles to bring this story to the big screen,” the filmmakers tell BDE. “We fulfilled our promise to the communities to present their struggle with dignity, rigour, and cinematic care.” The film was the headline title of Sarajevo Film Festival’s Human Rights Day.

Veteran Israeli artist and director Amos Gitai returns to Venice with his latest feature documentary, The Road to Jericho, a poetic meditation on conflict in the Middle East and the diminishing prospects for peace. The director tells Business Doc Europe how he regards culture as “one of the only channels which is remaining to create a dialogue.” That is why he so opposes cultural boycotts. “If you block any form of dialogue, then, OK, let’s go to the next war. I think channels of dialogue always should remain open.”

UK director Louise Lockwood discusses her new feature doc Bel, which closes EIFF on August 19 and which profiles the prodigiously talented Kenyan-Scottish artist-musician-singer Beldina Odenyo who took her own life in 2021. “What an utter tragedy that that talent has been stopped. It’s obviously heart-breaking for the family, a human loss, but that raw, raw talent was totally the same. Bel and Amy [Winehouse] were very similar in that respect,” Lockwood tells BDE.

Dublin-based former Yugoslavian filmmaker Dragana Jurišić talks to Business Doc Europe about her debut documentary, a film both joyous and heart-rending, which tells the stories of maverick filmmaker Hari Džekson, a director of westerns, and his home town of Bijeljina, where the war in Bosnia started in 1992. In the feature doc, Jurišić also sets out to create her own western in the style of Hari. “When we were filming, everyone came together - Serbs, Roma, Muslims, Croats. It was such a joyful happy atmosphere, and there was absolutely no reason why these people shouldn't be friends - except for these man-made identity structures that are imposed on them.”

In his new feature doc, world-premiering in Sarajevo, Damir Markovina urges his father, politician Roko Markovina, both to return to the Bosnian city of Mostar from which he exiled himself over 30 years ago, and to acknowledge the repercussions of the personal and political choices and decisions he took back then. “If you don't deal with a problem, your children will have to deal with it, in one way or another,” the director tells BDE.

Dutch producer Renko Douze discusses Ukrainian Helena Maksyom’s feature doc Don't Ask Me If I Killed, sold by Esther van Messel’s First Hand Films, that chronicles the director’s life as a soldier in defence of her country. “It’s such a special and individual story. It’s really her story - and a very human perspective on the frontline,” Douze says of the film, receiving its International Premiere in Sarajevo Documentary Competition.

In her new feature doc, world-premiering at Sarajevo FF, Dutch-based Croatian director Tatjana Bozic discusses the business of loneliness, and being a stranger in a strange land. “It explores the loss of roots, community, and identity through the lens of migration and motherhood. As I discovered while making the film, the feeling of not belonging often begins long before we cross borders, it starts within our own families.”

Jordanian Asmahan Bkerat’s feature doc debut tells of the Afro-Palestinian-Bedouin Najar family living on agricultural land on the outskirts of Amman, the Jordan capital, whose bucolic yet fragile existence is severely threatened by plans to construct modern villas in their immediate vicinity. “I wasn’t a filmmaker before meeting the Najars,” says Bkerat. “This film was born out of the threat they faced, the brutality and destruction of the land, a threat that compelled me to pick up a camera, to document what was left of it and them.”