Interviews

Tristan da Cunha may be the most remote inhabited island on the planet, but it is nevertheless the place where Loran Bonnardot, a piano-playing doctor from Paris, is determined to settle. His existentialist journey, part-fictionalised, is chronicled by Swiss director Tobias Nölle. “I saw in Loran a castaway from our hyper-competitive society, seeking an authenticity we’ve lost, on an island secluded from our war-torn world; a dream I wanted to transform into a cinematic experience,” he says. The film won The Golden Horn for Best Film in International Competition at Krakow 2026.

Mongolian director Khoroldorj Choijoovanchig and French co-writer Chantal Perrin talk to BDE about their feature doc Colors of White Rock, which reintroduces us to Maikhuu, one of the few female drivers on the treacherous ‘coal highway’ that snakes through the Gobi Desert. It is a gritty but poetic film. “I didn’t want it to be really, really political, but in a way the topic, the theme of the story, engages with the current situation in Mongolia,” the director notes to BDE of a story that can’t help but have a strong political undertow.

In Magic Hour, world-premiering in Krakow, director Marcin Borchardt profiles the brilliant Polish DoP Piotr Sobociński who struggled with the extreme stresses of working within the Hollywood system. He died of a heart attack while still in his creative prime. “That was perhaps the most unsettling discovery for me,” Borchardt tells Business Doc Europe. “I found countless shots of anonymous hotel interiors and temporary spaces filmed between productions. It was as if the camera had unintentionally captured the psychological cost of that career and that lifestyle.”

The Netherlands-based Italian filmmaker discusses his new feature documentary, selected for Krakow FF Int’l Comp, about the ongoing febrile political situation in Armenia. “The moment I got interested in Shahen was when I realised the pressure this young guy was under,” recalls director Marco De Stefanis of his activist subject. “He was keeping up the fight while his father was in prison. I felt really sorry for a guy that age that doesn’t have the same youth I had.”

The genocide in Namibia between 1904 and 1908 is still regarded in Germany with scant interest. German tourists still visit Namibia in huge numbers but few know about the dark shared history between the countries. The new feature doc Sorry for the Genocide, world-premiering June 3 at Doxumentale and co-directed by Theodora Shandé, Matteo Sant'Unione, Lisa Ossenbrink and Elmarie Kapunda, gives a long overdue platform to descendants of those who died. Shandé talks to BDE.

In her short film Hidden, Polish director Monika Kotecka examines the emotions of fear and anxiety, using archive culled from the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, and the application both of polyphonic voices and a soundscape derived from bodily sounds, such as breathing and heartbeat. Severe anxiety, we are told, affects 4.4% of the world’s population. “I didn't want to make an autobiographical film,” Kotecka tells Business Doc Europe. “But of course my own experiences were, let's say, an important starting point.”

Polish filmmaker Paweł Łoziński speaks to Business Doc Europe before the presentation of the inaugural Marcel Łoziński International Documentary Award, devised by Kraków Film Festival and the Polish Documentary Film Directors Guild in honour of his late, great father. Paweł is Marcel’s son, and sat on the jury which will hand the new prize June 3 to Cuban filmmaker David Bim for his debut effort To the West in Zapata. “It is a documentary about the power of love, something essential that allows the protagonists to endure the hardships of their lives,” says Paweł of Bim’s film.

Roni Aboulafia’s thrilling feature documentary chronicles the attempts to extract 167 Afghans from the country after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. “It was an intensely life-changing experience for all of us,” the director tells BDE of the Herculean task. “It’s hard to grasp fully in the moment, but one simple act of sisterhood grew into something enormous and unimaginable. It was beyond what I thought I could handle… At the same time, it was empowering. I learned we are capable of far more than we think.”

Poland’s vibrant documentary sector, and that of Ukraine, will once more be in the frame at KFF Industry, the professional arm of Krakow FF, with attention again focussed on the Docs to Start and Docs to Go presentations of 21 new and ambitious projects. “It seems only natural that, since Ukrainian filmmakers have been cut off from opportunities for artistic and professional development, we should help if we are in a position to do so,” Industry boss Katarzyna Wilk tells BDE of KFF’s solidarity with neighbouring Ukraine.

Brazilian Eliza Capai’s delightful feature documentary engages the talents of a group of young girls, living in one of the poorest parts of Brazil, to examine the business of…well, being young girls (as well as some other big topics, such as death and religion and their future lives). Despite their poverty, such is director Capai’s confidence in her protagonists, who operate as de facto co-creators of her film, we could be watching any kids from any city in the world, and from any socio-economic background. “We were in this fluidity of creation,” Capai delightedly tells BDE.