Interviews

Jana is one of a small number of Protestant pastors in Slovenia. But while her faith remains intact, she begins to question her commitment to life as a cleric as she is increasingly sidelined by the Church authorities. At the same time, her marriage is under severe strain, and she further confides to director Prettner, in the most candid of terms, of childhood sexual abuse that she suffered. “We spent two hours a day when we were driving, and in the car she revealed the most intimate stuff,” the director tells BDE.

Norwegian Democrazy may focus ostensibly on Lars Thorsen and Fanny Bråten, a pair of objectionable Quran-burning anti-Islam extremists, but the raison d’etre of the film is to explore the difficult overlap between ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech’ and how modern democracy is geared up to deal with this. “He knows exactly how far it can go and how far it cannot go,” co-director Kjøge Rønning says of the ‘free speech’ dilemma that Thorsen is all too keen to exploit.

In Limits of Europe, Czech journalist Sasha Uhlová sets out to experience what it’s like to be an Eastern European economic migrant in the West, working impossibly long hours for low wages and leaving behind her partner, four kids and seriously ill father - just as so many economic migrants are forced to do. The film “is a mirror reflecting the world we live in even though we have a habit of turning a blind eye to what is happening in it,” says director Apolena Rychlíková.

André Singer talks to BDE about arguably the most thorough and in-depth account of how the former comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to power. He admits that he had “a certain level of cynicism” about how the Ukrainian President might use his stage skills to try to charm and win over his interviewer, but this was short-lived. “I genuinely found him to be a pretty honourable and honest player in difficult, impossible circumstances,” says co-director Singer.

Combining documentary and dramatic elements, To Our Friends depicts its young protagonist Sara at a pivotal moment in her life. She likes “raising hell” with her best pal Pedro, having fun and getting into scrapes on the streets, but she is also intrigued by the lives of her new friends who work in theatre. “I always try to avoid that conflict between documentary and fiction. I don’t care too much which genre I am shooting,” director Orr tells BDE.

We Are Inside, which world-premiered in Nyon, explores the father-daughter relationship between poet Mustapha and his filmmaker daughter Farah Kassem in all its complexity. As she tells Business Doc Europe, director Kassem wanted “to create situations where both our mediums could meet, my camera and his poetry.”

Marcos Simon Mossello & Elias Ezequiel Gismondi set out to investigate the business of being bald, together with the residents of Tostado, an Argentinian town where hair seems to be largely absent among the men folk. “The idea for the film came to us from baldness itself, we believe that personal experiences are what take you to a place that gives you the possibility of telling something authentic, with substance, whether in a documentary or fiction,” the pair tell BDE.

In the dream-like Carropasajero we hear the testimonies of indigenous men and women from the Wayúu community in Colombia who are haunted by their colonial past. “In a way, it [the film] is invoking [the dead]. It is a way of giving presence and a voice to those who are not here. For us, that was one of the most powerful things, to feel that the process of [making] a film could be a way of sharing grief,” Carranza tells BDE.

In her feature doc, which receives its Swiss prem at VdR, Dutch director Saskia Gubbels observes, at first hand, how change is effected within the Amsterdam Fire Department towards wider gender and ethnic inclusivity. The central character, commander Gerrie, puts up little objection to his every move, nor those of his team, being followed, but he certainly wasn't going to change behaviour for the camera, says director Gubbels.

A doc as a western. A western as a doc. Who could ask for more? In his debut feature Alexis Franco tells a story of elemental forces and extreme opposites. Desert and water. Childhood and old age. Wind and fire. Life and death. All set against the vast backdrop of the Argentinian Pampas, and populated by the director’s own gaucho family. Franco talks to Business Doc Europe about life in the big country.