Interviews

Iranian Nasreen wants to sing in a country where women have been banned from public performance since 2016. She is also the mother of two children within a loveless marriage. “Over seven years of filming Nasreen, I closely witnessed her journey to free her voice as a singer and a woman,” says director Leila Amini, sister of Nasreen. “From a vulnerable homemaker, she gradually transformed into a woman in control of her own destiny.”

The concept of ‘real’ has undergone fundamental reinterpretation in the digital age, especially since the pandemic, argues (and demonstrates) Italian Adele Tulli in her new documentary. “I began this project with an urge to delve into the ongoing emotional, social and cognitive metamorphoses triggered by our relationship with digital technologies,” she says. “I felt that whatever we used to call real was collapsing and I started looking for ways to represent this collapse.”

Mala Reinhardt takes an existential trip through Germany, Ghana and her own past as she examines aspects of “Blackness, queerness, friendship and the differences that connect us.” She also examines the business of being German. “What's happening now is that people who've grown up with experiences similar to mine are being very vocal about it and they're claiming their space and they're claiming their German identity,” the director tells BDE.

In his found footage documentary Eight Postcards From Utopia (world-premiering in Fuori Concorso), Golden Bear-winning director and arch cinematic provocateur Radu Jude casts a very quizzical eye on the world of Romanian advertising in the post-socialist years. Working with philosopher [and co-director] Christian Ferencz-Flatz, Jude explores the hidden meanings behind these commercials. The co-directors talk to BDE.

Ulla and Didi are loving and caring parents, even of a serial killer convicted of nearly 90 murders. In their feature doc, German directors Katharina Köster and Katrin Nemec profile the humble mother and father and their attempts to cope with the dreadful reality of their lives. “The relationship [with their son] is characterised by very strong emotions, between great love and affection, but also between contempt and not being able to forgive,” the directors tell BDE.

Transportation of the vulnerable has been a necessity in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of February 24 2022. So has the transportation of the dead, tragically, as the bodies of fallen soldiers are collected and returned to grieving loved ones. “It's something I never experienced before. It's something I had never seen before. I wanted to dig into this topic as a human being and also as a filmmaker, to explore it and also to tell about it,” director Juri Rechinsky tells BDE.

Claudia Marschal’s feature documentary tells a story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and of one man’s refusal to be silenced over the wrongs he had to suffer. It is also the story of a dad whose life is filled with regrets having not taken seriously his son’s pleas for help. At the heart of the film is a recorded deposition that victim/survivor Emmanuel Siess made to the French police. Director Claudia Marschal, Emmanuel’s cousin, talks to BDE.

Thirteen years after his award-winning Two Years at Sea (2011) Ben Rivers returns to the Scottish highlands to chronicle the life of hermit Jake Williams. “I started seeing new details and thinking about what big major changes the world had been through,” Rivers tells BDE of his initial delay to shooting. “It was interesting that his [Jake’s] life somehow remained quite untouched and intact. That turned it around for me - and then I was fine!”

New docs by such heavyweights as Petra Costa, Amos Gitai, Asif Kapadia, Kevin Macdonald and Errol Morris play in the Out of Competition Non-fiction sidebar, while Wang Bing’s Youth - Homecoming gets the nod for Venezia 81 Competition. Orrizonti Competition hosts the feature docs Wishing On A Star by Péter Kerekes and Mistress Dispeller by Elizabeth Lo. A further nine docs on cinema are selected for Venice Classics.

Britpop band Blur get the full doc treatment in Toby L’s new film, released in the UK and Ireland on July 19. It is a fully cinematic experience, telling how the band put together its first album in eight years before going back on the road. “One of my pet grievances with music docs is that they feel a bit detached. They don’t emotionally tune you into the vibrancy of the performance. For me, I obsess over those details. To put people in a dark room with a big screen, that is definitely my desire,” the director tells BDE.