Interviews

“I’m stating the obvious by saying that filmmakers and film festivals have a crucial role to play in preserving democracy, free speech, critical thinking, and in resisting reactionary ideologies,” a candid Pierre-Alexis Chevit, Head of Cannes Docs, tells BDE before doors open on the 2026 edition. The event kicks off May 14, and will culminate May 19 with Doc Day, which this year will include top-level contributions from the likes of Mstyslav Chernov, Mark Cousins, Ema Ryan Yamazaki and David Greaves, as well as the Docs-in-Progress Awards Ceremony.

Marcin Borchardt explains to BDE what led him to make his new feature documentary My Themersons, about the life and work of artists and filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. “What moves me most…generally is their refusal to separate intellectual life from emotional life,” Borchardt says. “Stefan could write highly sophisticated philosophical texts and at the same time produce works full of absurd humour, tenderness and vulnerability. They were both profoundly serious and profoundly playful at once. That combination is extremely rare.”

Polish filmmakers Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert talk to BDE about their new doc which, in turn, focuses on the work of a rehabilitation centre for victims of war, a Ukrainian transgender artist and dancer now living in Poland, and the Open Group artistic collective that explores the impact of the war on Ukrainian civilians. “I think we were quite sensitive observers,” says co-director Englert who, with Szumowska, learned the power of quiet observation when studying film in Łódź. “That’s the way of storytelling we always favour. Without words, you can say a lot.”

In their feature documentary Ice Women, selected for DOK.fest Munich, Jens Becker and Dorothea Braun set out to challenge the male-dominated story of Arctic exploration by shining the spotlight on the courage, resilience, and scientific contributions of women in the far North. For Braun, it all started with an old photograph of a woman in Arctic clothing wearing rifle. “I remember thinking: Why don’t I know her? Why have I never heard about women like her? The more I searched, the more I realized that the absence was not accidental.”

One of eccentric artist Arek Pasożyt’s pet obsessions is to find traces of the Tatra Mountains Panorama, a long-lost massive painting from the 1890s that was 115 metres long and 16 metres high - but that was broken up. In Bigger Picture, world-premiering at MDAG, Polish director Mikołaj Janik follows Arek on this journey. The artist is strongly left-wing, Janik tells BDE. He doesn’t believe in consumer culture, and he is relentlessly cheerful, refusing to become downcast about setbacks. He further likens him to an ancient knight on a heroic quest, or to “some kind of Indiana Jones…”

The Spanish Civil War has a strong personal resonance for director Ricardo Iscar. Back then, four bodies of workers murdered by the Falangists were buried in a field owned by his family in Salamanca. In the documentary, these bodies are finally being exhumed, and Iscar is there to film the process. Seeing how viciously the war divided Spain in the 1930s, Iscar has a warning for viewers: “Nothing is guaranteed. The democracy and civil rights we have, we have to fight to keep them…”

In María Molina Peiró’s Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), a remote robot searches a distant planet both for minerals and signs of life, while far way, beside one of the oldest mines in the world, inhabitants live surrounded by mountains of mineral waste under which are buried both towns and memories. “The main protagonist of this place [is] not even the people or the landscape, but its ecosystem that extends far beyond its own physical and temporal frontiers or limits,” says director Molina Peiró.

In his feature debut, new graduate Felix Lange follows Eastern European lorry drivers on strike in Germany, their action prompted by anger at allegedly unpaid wages. The context is grim. Over 300,000 drivers from these countries work in the EU - and many are being viciously exploited. At first, some of the striking drivers were wary of Lange in their presence. “But then suddenly I met this very close group of 10 Georgians and they took me in…” he tells BDE.

In 1996, intrepid Swedish freelance journalist Erling Söderström was part of an expedition into the Amazon jungle with Brazilian ethnographer and social activist, Sydney Possuelo. They were trying to make “first contact” with the Korubo Indians. As we see in Nathan Grossman’s new feature doc, 30 years on the footage makes for highly uncomfortable viewing, with the encounter seeming both awkward and exploitative. “It shows what enormous risks there are in relationship to these contact events,” Grossman tells BDE. “It’s also why, today, these kind of situations should be avoided to the largest extent we can.”

After he read Joe Kane’s classic piece of travel journalism ‘Running The Amazon,’ about how, in the mid- 1980s, eleven intrepid Europeans set off on an epic journey by kayak across the entire length of the Amazon river, Polish director Rafał Skalski was immediately smitten. “When I read the book, I decided it was a great theme for documentary,” he tells BDE. “What intrigued me most was that the foreground was dominated by what was happening between the people [on the trip], the emotions, conflicts and relationships.”