Interviews

In his Oscar short-listed feature doc, Luke Lorentzen follows outspoken hospital chaplain Mati and supervisor David as the former engages in an emotionally challenging and physically exhausting year-long residency at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai during Covid. “It was Mati pushing back that I think made the film a really profound and deeper dive into the work, but it required a reorientation of a certain way of working that I had applied in other projects,” the filmmaker tells BDE.

Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-shortlisted feature doc started out as a study of toxic masculinity in India before transforming into the story of a father’s search for justice following the horrific rape of his 13-year old daughter. “I didn’t actually realise until the edit. It was two years into the editing process that we pivoted, switched gears and decided that we were just going to focus on this story,” Pahuja tells BDE.

While undertaking research following a near-fatal fall, forest ecologist and biology professor Nalini Nadkarni begins to expose, little by little, the tangled roots of her troubled and disturbing childhood. Director Andrew Nadkarni, Nalini’s nephew, talks to Business Doc Europe about his Oscar-shortlisted short film.

Frederick Wiseman can’t remember what he ate the first time he went to Le Bois Sans Feuilles restaurant in Ouche, France, but knows it was good. In fact it was so good he asked top chef and future successor César Troisgros if he could document life in the extablishment. “It’s very rare that I eat in a 3-star restaurant, and I can’t turn off my documentary filmmaker eye. I hadn’t planned to do it but I just blurted it [the idea] out and I was happy when he said why not,” Wiseman tells BDE.

It’s a magical place, a warehouse in LA which many have likened to Gepetto’s workshop in Pinocchio. Broken musical instruments are brought here in their dozens and craftspeople put them back together again. In their latest film together, Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers go inside the workshop which ensures that school kids without money can continue to play their violins, trumpets and pianos. The filmmakers talk to BDE.

At the heart of Elisa Gambino’s multi award-winning short documentary is the unbreakable bond between Jessa and her young teen brother Jary whom the rest of her family rejected from birth due to his facial disfigurement. Despite living in poverty with two children of her own, she sets out to arrange the corrective surgery that will transform his life. “It was a profound honour to direct this film and share Jessa’s masterclass in unconditional love,” says director Gambino.

In her directorial debut at the age of 84, legendary US doc producer Sheila Nevins turns to the shocking restrictions placed by US educators on reading material for kids. These includes works by James Baldwin and Margaret Atwood as well as graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about The Holocaust. The constituency Nevins turns to in her film is the kids themselves. “I know what the left thinks, I know what the right thinks, I don’t know what the kid thinks,” she sums up why children are placed fully in the frame.

Vita Maria Drygas’ Danger Zone is described as “a front-row, unfiltered, look at the global war tourism industry,” a film in which its subjects prefer being in the most lethal conflict zones to lounging on the beach. “The most important thing that drove me to the subject, it wasn’t to tell the story of these particular characters. I really thought it was more universal - that the subject shows the condition of our world. It was for me like a mirror of our times,” Drygas tells BDE.

How did an upper middle-class English filmmaker like John Schlesinger, whose previous feature was a Thomas Hardy adaptation, come to make the definitive movie about underground New York in the late 1960s? And how did he get a Hollywood studio to pay for it? These are among the questions that Nancy Buirski asks in her new feature doc, which is well positioned to advance during the upcoming Awards season. She talks to BDE.

“In making the film, I discovered he [Little Richard] was more than an icon. He had incredible substance that has never been really documented. His anarchic, rebellious spirit has left a musical and cultural impression on us to this day,” the director tells Business Doc Europe during a whistle stop trip to London in early December to introduce a special screening of her new film at the V&A Museum in South Kensington.