Interviews

In his new film The Pigeon Tunnel (in cinemas and on Apple TV globally from October 20th), renowned documentary maker Errol Morris explores the life and work of writer John Le Carré, author of such classic espionage novels as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. “[I] could have gone on forever with this guy,” the Oscar-winning Morris tells Business Doc Europe.

The feature documentary Ana + kek tells a very personal story, about twin sisters whose beliefs have taken them on very different paths. “I felt I was too close to the subject,” says Zohra Benhammou of why she turned to Romy Mana to co-direct the film. “I needed someone who [could] take a distance [from it], to guide me into the story.”

The Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) toppers talked to Business Doc Europe about the effectiveness of CONNEXT and about the need for an increase in core investment in the documentary sector. Yes, Flemish doccers may be “punching above their weight” in delivering great content despite low funding levels, “but that's the kind of argument we don't use towards politicians, because then they say you have enough money,” VAF CEO Koen van Bockstal insists.

Not every film about three generations of an Antwerp family can boast artistic cameos (at least in photo form) by the likes of Paul McCartney, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger and Edith Piaf. But this is no ordinary family. Flemish director Aldine Reinink presents an intimate and moving portrait of the Antwerp-based photographic Selleslags dynasty, at the heart of which is Herman (father to Jan and son of Rik) whose pictures have chronicled more vividly than most the golden era of late 20th Century pop culture.

Producer Hans Everaert (Menuetto Film) talks to Business Doc Europe about the late Jan Hoet, one of the most controversial European art curators of recent decades and profiled in Luc Vrydaghs’s dynamic auteur feature doc, close to completion and ready for delivery in early 2024. “With Jan Hoet, curation was from the gut. It was a physical kind of experience,” says Everaert.

Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe, whose new documentary The Jacket screened at the Flemish CONNEXT showcase, has been at the Gent Festival this week, just down the road from Antwerp, but he hasn’t been showing a movie. “I work here as an editor. It’s really just taking formats, making DCPs for the cinemas thinks like that, just technical work,” Poppe tells BDE of his current “side hustle” between making his own movies.

This week Sarah Lederman was singled out by Oscar-nominated Belgian director Lukas Dhont as one of the Future Five group of highly talented emerging filmmakers from the region. Lederman was the sole docmaker. “People say sometimes about me that I see things they didn’t see,” Lederman reflects to BDE, “I look deeply into things, I love details and I just love the things that make the everyday special.”

Film partnerships in Flanders sometimes start in surprising ways. The collaboration between director Marjolijn Prins (whose new feature doc project Fantastique won the Perfect Pitch Award at CONNEXT this week) and producer Mirna Everhard from Serendipity Films can be traced back to when they worked in the same bar. The director and producer explain all to BDE.

What starts as a story about humans, kidney stones and stones in a geological sense, slowly unfolds into a meditation on ecological grief. “We always say that stone is silent, it is dead. I wanted to do something opposite and bring it very much to life. The kidney stone is a metaphor for that,” says director Benoot.

This week Thom M. Vander Beken presented his work-in-progress that deals with a highly sensitive inflammatory subject, that of the systematic round-up of 10,000 Jews in Antwerp in 1942 and their subsequent deportation to the death camps. “Even 80 years after the end of the war, many in Flanders still find it difficult to fully acknowledge the tragedy that occurred,” the director said.