Interviews

Born to Fight explores the developmental journey of Tunisian female kickboxer Nawres from 2017 to 2024 within the context of the Arab Spring. “While many stories focus solely on the journey to Europe and the challenges faced there, this film shines a spotlight on the resilience and determination of those who opt to confront adversity head-on in their own communities,” Danish producer Rikke Tambo tells BDE.

Dutch Juul van der Laan describes her interactive project I M U as “an AI essay film installation in which I, the maker, manipulate the viewer’s image using deepfake - live. It is a personal confrontation with the technology and a meditative intervention on what the self and your self-image really are.” The project is presented within the inaugural New Tech Pitch session at DocsBarcelona Industry.

“The geographical position of Barcelona makes us a connection point between Latin America, Europe, and the Mediterranean,” new Industry Head Èric Motjer tells BDE of the DocsBarcelona Industry programme (May 6-10), whose success is in finding “a balance between a selection of creatively challenging projects with co-production potential, and ensuring that the market is, at the same time, a space for analyzing and debating the future ahead.”

Do you remember when tech start-ups would find you a place for the night, or locate a taxi just a minute away, or deliver you a burger? Just to make the business of living that little bit easier. Well, now start-ups are dealing in death, enabling grieving folk to communicate with AI-generated versions of their deceased loved ones, via web chat or VR. “[People] don't believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can't deal with the fact that death is finite,” co-director Moritz Riesewieck tells BDE. “And these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”

UK viewers are likely to be deeply shocked by Our Land, Our Freedom, which competes in Main Competition at DocsBarcelona. It reveals the brutality with which British colonial soldiers treated freedom fighters during the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. “We are only scratching the surface with this film. We would have loved to have gone much deeper…maybe if Netflix offers us a 10-part series, we will!” says co-director Meena Nanji.

Dutch-based Ukrainian filmmaker Mariia Ponomarova discusses her new film portraying a group of very competitive 50 year+ cheerleaders in Kharkiv. “We really hope that people will be excited to see Nice Ladies because it is a film full of laughter, tears and bittersweet moments, painful moments but moments that are worth living through,” says director Ponomarova.

The doc duo discuss their film in which, over the course of five weeks, they studied the lives of three Dutch teenage girls on their summer holidays at a campsite in France. “There were a lot of conversations that took place before we went [to the campsite] about love, and about who they are. There were countless hours of intimacy we had with them. [Then] at some point, they just forget you,” says co-director Natalie Bruijns of their subjects’ ease in front of camera.

Before doors open on the 27th DocsBarcelona (May 2 to 12), Business Doc Europe talks to Artistic Director Anna Petrus about the event that has become one of southern Europe’s must-attend doc fests. “The festival takes place during the first two weeks of May when Barcelona becomes the epicenter of documentary filmmakers and professionals from all over the world,” Petrus underlines.

In Malta, abortion is illegal, almost without exception. In Italy, a single woman cannot have IVF treatment, while only a small number of European countries allow for euthanasia or assisted suicide. So it is not surprising that Europe has seen a boom in cross-border “medical tourism” over recent years, a phenomenon that Greek director Elina Psykou examines in her feature doc Stray Bodies, selected for EFP’s Changing Face of Europe programme. Psykou talks to BDE.

Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists […who…] shared the same discomfort with the contemporary world,” director Morabito tells BDE of his friend and subject.