Interviews

Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s delicious and elegiac feature documentary describes a love triangle of sorts, between a female Irish aristocrat, the revered 20th Century architect Le Corbusier and the house that she built in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur, which he later appropriated. Minger had been pre-warned about the allure of the brilliant Eileen Gray. “Beatrice, be careful because if you enter the Gray zone, you'll never get out of it,” she was told.

Gröndahl’s feature documentary follows Finnish birth experts – midwife Kirsi and doula Anna-Riitta - who want to put an end to “obstetric violence” and enable people to give birth on their own terms. “I believe that if this was something people with testicles would experience, not with wombs, there would be more resources put into this, but it’s [seen as] a woman’s issue and so is [considered] not so important,” the director muses on the gender politics behind birth.

Italian director Leone Balduzzi discusses his debut feature Sting Like A Bee, about a group of teens growing up in the south of Italy. The project started life as a piece of branded content for Piaggio bikes. “Quite spontaneously, all the topics of the documentary – including sex, AIDS and homosexuality – emerged. These [topics] originated together [with the kids]. To some extent, it’s been like a social experiment,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

Sometimes docmakers struggle very hard to find their subjects. In the case of Lie To Me (international premiere March 18), the subject (Bjørn Bjercke, Bitcoin expert and whistleblower) came direct to the filmmakers, at which point they were immediately pulled into the “rabbit hole” of OneCoin, the fraudulent cryptocurrency presided over by the glamorous Bulgarian-born German swindler Ruja Ignatova, soon to be become one of the FBI’s “most wanted” felons…

In Connie Field’s feature documentary, which world-premieres at CPH:DOX, three Hungarian women fight to expose the dismantling of democracy in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. The director believes that her story can have strong resonance for US audiences. “Who I made it for was people like me, to scare them to death, so that in my country specifically, we will work like mad to make sure that Trump doesn’t get into the White House,” she tells BDE.

Swedish doc debutant Loran Batti talks to BDE about his deeply intimate debut G - 21 Scenes from Gottsunda, set in Uppsala’s notorious titular suburb. In the film, Batti grapples with the desire to move away, but is torn by loyalty to his childhood friends who lead a criminal life. “Speaking about the spiritual and the human aspect, it was so hard for me to keep distant from the film, the project, the place and the subject,” he tells BDE.

Trapped in the freezing forest between Belarus and Poland, 16-year-old Kurdish refugee Runa must assume all family responsibilities for her father and brothers after the death of their mother. In her new hybrid doc, Polish Agnieszka Zwiefka follows Runa as she tries to create a new life for her family in Poland, in the process telling a story both terrifying and inspirational. “This is actually our obligation as documentary filmmakers. Who would we be if we didn't react to such a humanitarian crisis at our doorstep,” Zwiefka underlines to BDE.

As Norwegian filmmaker Ellen Ugelstad shows in her new feature documentary, cruelty and coercion within mental health care still continues today. But in tackling it, she takes an unusual stylistic approach. Rather than use verité filmmaking, the director tells her story as if she is making a report for a CNN-like TV news channel. “I thought how can I convey it not in a more entertaining, but a different way, and get a different perspective on it,” the director tells BDE.

Rand Beiruty’s Tell Them About Us is a refugee movie with a difference. Its young female protagonists have fled their homelands to come to Germany. They and their families are living in difficult circumstances but the tone of the film is very upbeat. “I wanted it to be more participatory and more empowering for the girls,” Jordanian director Beiruty tells BDE of her intentions. “It’s also a film about family, about friendship and about the love they have for each other.”

New Head of Industry Mara Gourd-Mercado and MD Katrine Kiilgaard spoke to BDE about how CPH goes about the business of doc. This year the Forum presents a whopping 46 projects whose key criteria are artistic quality, relevance and marketability, they stress. “It's that kind of magic formula that ties it all together that we're looking for, something that will interest the industry, that will garner attention and that will potentially go and get those partners and get these projects made,” says Gourd-Mercado.