Interviews

Dutch visual artist Barbara Visser discusses her hybrid documentary that questions Marcel Duchamp’s authorship over what some claim to be the 20th Century’s most important piece of modern art. Instead, the artwork ‘Fountain’ may well have been the work of a maverick Dadaist baroness. “The art world needs turmoil and criticism and rearrangement, and so that was really the trigger,” says the director of her subject.

October 10 sees the launch of a new European doc fest and Industry programme that has Impact at its root. The Berlin-based Dokumentale offers a programme of 47 dynamic and very diverse docs as well as an Industry programme that will encourage the formation of “purpose-driven partnerships that have the potential to bring about real change.” Festival founders Vivian Schröder & Anna Ramskogler-Witt explain all to BDE.

The statistics are stark. More than 400,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the past 20 years. In his new feature documentary Marching In The Dark (sold by Lightdox and long-listed for Best Documentary for the European Film Awards 2024), Kinshuk Surjan explores the circumstances leading to this tragic loss of life. He spoke to Business Doc Europe before the film’s world premiere at CPH:DOX.

Direct Action, long-listed for Best Documentary ahead of the European Film Awards 2024, documents the everyday lives within one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France. The filmmakers’ intentions were straightforward. As co-director Russell puts it, “the goal was to spend time with people we really admired and to spend time in a place that is mysterious, and to understand [it] for ourselves.”

Paris-based French-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film (long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards 2024) that documents four generations of women in her family, one of whom is the internationally renowned actress Hiam Abbass, the director’s mother. “It's as if the women of my family…each represent a piece of history, a piece of time that doesn't exist anymore,” says Soualem.

In At Averroès & Rosa Parks (long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards 2024), French documentary master Nicolas Philibert continues his exploration of mental illness and its treatments in French hospitals. “Making movies is my solution to keep balance in my life,” the director tells BDE. “The people I film are very vulnerable but they reflect back something I have inside me too.”

Chaplin, Spirit of the Tramp (screening at Festival Lumière in Lyon following its world premiere last month in San Sebastián, where it won the Irizar Basque Film Award) is a deceptive affair. The documentary offers startling new insights into the family background of Charlie Chaplin, arguably the most famous movie star of the 20th Century…and his son Michael for whom Charlie’s celebrity was a huge burden. Director Carmen Chaplin, Charlie’s grand-daughter, tells more to BDE.

Producer Sandra Enkvist tells BDE about her new project, directed by Vesa Kuosmanen, which pulls back the curtain on a dramatic period in Finland’s queer history. “In the 80s, the fear of AIDS was universal, and its legacy still echoes in the lives of the survivors among us. We want to make a film which breaks free from the fear that has shaped so much of queer history,” she says.

“This project is vital because it tells a story that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. Its themes of family, dependency, and the human need for connection are timeless, and its heartfelt portrayal of these issues will undoubtedly engage audiences worldwide,” says producer Juha Löppönen of The Beauty of Errors, a portrait of a family for whom home is the epicentre of everything.

The Norwegian/Finnish In Cod We Trust is described as a portrait of a town, and a meditation on home and belonging. “To a fishing village, at the very top of the world, in the far north of Norway, people from all over the world have come in search of a better life. It creates an exciting symbiosis of people, and a society completely out of the ordinary,” producer Benedikte Bredesen tells Business Doc Europe of her FFA project.