Interviews

Earlier this month incumbent DAE executive board members Brigid O’Shea and Julianna Ugrin were re-elected for another 3-year term following the online vote of DAE members. Speaking to Business Doc Europe at Berlinale (where DAE was launched in 2020) O’Shea underlined once more the organisation’s raison d’être. “We are vocal, outspoken and in the ears of decision makers on our members' behalf; we are fighting for the best conditions for documentary filmmaking every day!”

Rotterdam-based filmmaker Sara Rajaei’s City of Poets is a short hybrid work that reflects on the countless inequities suffered by women. It is a film both deeply melancholic and shot through with a magical realist aesthetic. “At the same time the film is addressing something real. Something of our contemporary history and things that I experienced during my childhood and that I still experience. So yes, it is a fairy-tale, but it is about something much larger, much more universal.”

The Norwegian Film Institute Film Commissioner (Documentary) and International Relations Manager talk to Business Doc Europe on the eve of Berlinale 2024, just weeks after two Norwegian documentaries (Ibelin and A New Kind of Wilderness) garnered three of Sundance 2024’s top doc awards. “I started to cry actually,” Aalmo remembers her reaction to the wins. “I was so incredibly happy on behalf of the filmmakers. It was amazing. It was fantastic.”

The conversations are chilling and, as the film’s title indicates, intercepted. Russian soldiers calling home chat about their casual looting of trainers or electrical goods and, as if in passing, how they’ve been torturing and killing the local Ukrainians. “It was in the first days of the invasion that I started listening to [the intercepted calls]…the effect they had on me was of some kind of cognitive dissonance,” director Karpovych tells BDE. “It was really shocking and very painful to realise how absurd they were."

Chilean Maite Alberdi talks to BDE about her Oscar-nominated feature doc The Eternal Memory, her second nomination in four years after The Mole Agent in 2021. The Eternal Memory offers a gentle, probing examination of a marriage, that between journalist and author Augusto Góngora, and Paulina Urrutia (an actress and former Minister of Culture). They’re a couple devoted to one another, and have been together for more than two decades. But Augusto has Alzheimer’s, and his memory is no longer reliable.

Leading French producer Bertrand Faivre explains to Business Doc Europe why he boarded acclaimed novelist Christine Angot’s feature doc debut, about the sexual abuse she suffered from her father when she was a young teenager. “I had a chance to see a few images of the film - and I was ready to take the risk to put up the money to finish it and to face whatever would happen,” Faivre says. “Wow, was my first response.”

The documentary about life in drought-ridden Kenya is told from three very different perspectives; the indigenous Kenyan farmers, the conservationists struggling to protect the land and the white ranchers who have been there for generations. “From the beginning, when we conceived the idea, we were really talking about how to achieve a result where an audience would be able to shift perspective,” Greek-born co-director Matziaraki tells BDE of the film. She is joined by producer Toni Kamau.

Canadian filmmakers Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy talk to BDE about their portrait of Lloyd, the compelling, homeless subject of their 62-minute film, selected for IFFR. They were struck in particular by his “timeless” quality, his “beautiful penetrating blue eyes” as Cassidy puts it, and his “biblical” beard. They felt he could have “walked out of an old daguerreotype or a Russian novel.”

In Island In Between, nominated for an Oscar in the Short Doc category, S. Leo Chiang reflects on his relationship with Taiwan, China and the US from the islands of Kinmen, just a few miles from mainland China. “Kinmen connects Taiwan to China but also keeps them apart. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to this place. I want to make sense of it. Growing up, this channel of water was the edge of our universe, separating good from evil,” the director underlines.

Dutch filmmaker Chris Teerink takes on one of the undoubted masterpieces of 20th Century literature in his latest creative documentary, which world-premieres in Rotterdam. “It's like being on a carpet that's constantly pulled from underneath you,’ he says of T.S. Eliot’s epic poem. “That feeling, that sensation, that was the real meaning of the poem for me, and became the focus of the film.”