Interviews

US journalist-turned-Academy Award-winning filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris visited the Czech capital last week in two capacities: as a juror in the International Human Rights Film Festival and as a guest tutor at Ex Oriente and the East Doc Platform. “Film is now global and the American audience is part of that global audience and people want to be able to reach it,” he told Business Doc Europe.

East Doc Platform, the largest co-production funding and distribution platform for Central and Eastern European documentaries, was once again placed centre stage as 59 projects from the region were last week presented to a wide variety of movers and shakers from the global documentary industry. Programme Director Zdeněk Blaha spoke to BDE about the importance of his event to the international documentary scene.

Fifteen years after her “first film” fell apart, US director Zia Anger has made My First Film, a deeply personal take on the experience, as told through her alter ego Vita (played by Odessa Young). “Rather than making a documentary or a hybrid, my intention was to make something that is fictional but based on a true story. As the making of the film went on, it felt more and more the unravelling of the story was just as important as the story itself,” she tells BDE.

Dutch producer/director Pieter van Huystee tells a largely untold story in his new feature doc When I Close My Eyes (which world premiered March 24 at Movies That Matter) - that of the Dutch women and children interned in Japanese prison camps in Indonesia during the Second World War. His mother and grandmother were among the captives enduring tough and traumatic experiences. The director talks to BDE.

Joe is the main protagonist of The Flats, living in a near derelict count estate in north Belfast. He’s a craggy, weather-beaten figure with a bony face full of grief. There is very little laughter in Joe’s life. He grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Nearly 50 years on, he is still painstakingly re-living those traumatic days. Bitter memories have distorted his life. “The face carries the scars…I think his face says so much,” director Alessandra Celesia tells BDE of her subject.

Shot over four years, The Black Garden tells the story of three generations living in the shadow of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, where war has become part of everyday life. “They've never known anything else. Their grandparents experienced war, their parents, and now it's the younger generations. They're unfortunately prepared for it, but they have an unshakeable determination,” director Pazoumian says of his subjects.

Yance Ford’s new feature doc Power (which screened at CPH:DOX and is soon to launch on Netflix) looks at the origins of police power in the US and asks why American citizens have allowed cops to hold so much sway over their lives. The film features interviews with many leading academics who detail with chilling clarity the reasons behind 200 years of American police bias and brutality. This, as Ford puts it to Business Doc Europe, is a system with “violence, coercion and control’ at its core.

Norwegian docmaker Benjamin Ree talks to BDE about his double-Sundance winning Ibelin, which screens at CPH ahead of its launch on Netflix. The film, about a young man and his secret gaming life that is only discovered after his untimely death, has been wowing both young and older audiences alike back in Norway. “A lot of them [the older generation] go to the cinema because they want to understand their children or their grandchildren,” says Ree.

The prolific and versatile Alina Simone has been working as a journalist and radio reporter for many years. She is also an essayist, author and singer-songwriter - and now she has turned feature filmmaker too. Her documentary Black Snow, about a Siberian mother-of-three who finds herself under the aggressive scrutiny of the Russian authorities when she steps up as a citizen journalist, world-premiered this week at CPH:DOX. Simone talks to BDE.

50 years on from that momentous night in April 1974 in Brighton, England, when the unsung Swedes won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, British filmmaker James Rogan is telling the story of one of the greatest pop bands in history with a depth and insight that transcends cheap nostalgia. “I love to make films about outsiders and I think that ABBA were the ultimate pop outsiders,” he tells BDE of his new feature doc, ABBA - Against the Odds.