Interviews

Pioneering new Brazilian political doc The Chamber/A Câmara (a world premiere in Doclisboa’s From The Earth To The Moon section) takes viewers deep into Brazil’s Chamber Of Deputies late during the highly controversial presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. The film follows the politicians in classic fly on the wall style - and all its subjects are female. The directors talk to Business Doc Europe.

“I started the film 20 years ago,” Ricardo Leite says of his feature documentary, whose full title reads ‘Lucefece: Where there is no vision, the people will perish.’ At film school, the director was part of a collective which made experimental shorts - and the new doc has links to the work he was doing then. “I saw this film was a way to find my own path, my own language, but still with references from the school.”

The new short film, directed by Dutch filmmakers Jefta Varwijk and Jaap van Heusden, focuses on paramedic Louis who recounts a series of horrific and traumatic events experienced in the line of duty over the course of 23 years. It is a film that demonstrates more graphically than most how, once seen, some things just cannot be unseen. “These are images that are etched into their retinas or etched into their souls,” Varwijk tells Business Doc Europe.

Czech filmmaker Petr Jančárek is not apologetic about his huge admiration for former President Václav Havel (1936-2011), the subject of his new feature documentary, Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me?, which opens this year’s Ji.hlava IDFF. “It’s actually true that Havel is perceived differently abroad than at home. Czech society is quite sharply divided between his admirers and those who actually hate him - literally,” the director tells BDE.

The new documentary chronicles the protests, sit-ins and strikes of workers in southern Spain as they face up to the prospect that they might be laid off. When she began filming, director Rodríguez made it clear to the strikers that she wasn’t a journalist working on a piece of reportage. She was a documentary maker making a film about the “convulsive changes” of the late industrial era, she tells BDE.

The new feature documentary Fire In The Mud unfolds in Unal, a rice producing village in Guinea-Bissau where the elders still have strong memories of the colonial war, lasting from 1963 to1974, in which the country fought for its independence from Portugal. But for the village’s youth, matters are somewhat different. “To them, the war was like a narrative from the past, like a fairy tale, a violent one, but really lost in the past,” Barroca tells BDE.

Prolific Canadian filmmaker Olivier Godin’s documentary shows visual artist and choreographer Adam Kinner and his dancers at work recreating the 1957 ballet work Suite Canadienne. “I had never done a documentary before. I thought, OK, let’s try things,” Godin tells BDE of his freewheeling approach to the task. It helped that Kinner gave the director ‘carte blanche’ to approach the film in any way he saw fit.

UK doccer Marc Isaacs talks to Business Doc Europe about his multi-layered new film set in the sleepy British town of Thaxted. It’s a film that involves ghosts and Morris dancing and a Chinese filmmaker visiting the town to find to the subject of her next film. “I was already thinking about Englishness, mythology and the way that the country over the last few years has desperately been trying to solidify some sense of itself,” Isaacs reflects.

Flemish production company Panenka’s 6-part series promises to lift the lid on the highly secretive workings within the higher echelons of the Catholic Church. “Despite our skeptical attitude, we knew that if we wanted to hear the voices of high-ranking clerics then we needed to adopt an open yet firm attitude, otherwise they would never talk,” series co-writer Jo Badisco explains to Business Doc Europe.

Fest director Miguel Ribeiro talks to Business Doc Europe about the upcoming edition of Doclisboa which presents 250 films from 42 countries, including 35 world premieres and 39 Portuguese films. “We see documentary as a way to employ the tools of cinema to take us on a quest of discovery. And for this, you need to have freedom for production, and freedom to think, to question and to reflect.” The festival opens October 19 with Wang Bing's Man in Black and closes with Leonor Teles’ Baan.