Interviews

Emmy Oost (Cassette for timescapes) is one of Belgium’s most innovative producers whose work invariably has a strong sense of political and social engagement. One such work is the new doc series She They Us - Towards an Equal Future by Sam Peeters, Heleen Declercq and Zaïde Bil which profiles seven people facing discrimination because of gender, sexuality, colour, age, class and religion. The producer talks to BDE.

“This year, it is quite obvious that filmmakers have gone out again, looking further…it was possible again after the lockdowns to go out into the world,” the Leipzig boss tells BDE about one of the trends within his 2023 programme. He also fulfils a longstanding ambition in 2023. For the first time, DOK Leipzig will host an International Competition for animated film.

On the face of it, the images we see in the post-war home films of Rose, the grandma of German director Annika Mayer, reflect nothing other than domestic bliss, good health and affluence, all set against a backdrop of the country’s economic recovery. But the footage we see hides 23 years of domestic violence, which is revealed by 90-year-old Rose as she is shown once more the Super-8 chronicle of her earlier life. The director talks to BDE.

During the busy days of Nordisk Panorama Forum 2023, Business Doc Europe caught up with Klara Nilsson Grunning, a commissioner at the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) and one of the body’s decision-makers for documentary features, international co-productions, series and digital storytelling.

“The ongoing success of Swedish documentaries owes a lot to co-production forums and festivals such as Nordisk Panorama,” SFI Doc Film Commissioner Anna Weitz tells BDE. “For Nordic filmmakers, the Nordisk Panorama is the one where concrete collaborations take off…it is really the place to go to pitch a project that can turn it into a Nordic co-production.”

Iris Olsson is one of two documentary commissioners at the Finnish Film Foundation. That means she is gatekeeper, assessing which projects will receive support from the Foundation. “In our strategy, we support diversity. With the means we have, we are trying to help upcoming artists to start their career; we are trying to get the international hits; we are trying to tackle the big, current subjects,” she tells BDE.

Fiction? Documentary? For prolific Danish producer Rikke Tambo Andersen, CEO of Tambo Film, both forms are equally appealing. “It’s two very different ways of thinking, both creatively but also financially,” Andersen tells BDE of the contrast between dramas and docs. “It keeps me on my toes creatively.” Andersen is at the Nordisk Panorama this week with two of her new doc projects in the Forum.

Prolific Finnish producer Kaarle Aho (Making Movies) discusses his urgent new doc project Truth.com with Business Doc Europe. “The film is about the use of fake news in the hybrid war that is taking place in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It is a highly topical, very important subject right now when there are forces trying to unbalance Europe on the move,” he says.

Standing in My Power presents contemporary childbirth culture in Finland as seen from the perspective of two birth professionals who are fighting for a better birth experience and the rights of the birthing people. “I believe we need a film like [this] today because birth-givers’ right to self-determination is still not a given in our culture, and because many birth-givers still lack the awareness, motivation or courage necessary to demand their rights,” producer Kirsi Mattila tells BDE.

Producer Oskar Forstén (Polygraf) discusses his archive feature doc Showtime in Helsinki, about a three-day Cold War extravaganza in 1975 whose unintended consequences only became obvious three decades later. “[It] is a film that deconstructs the anatomy of an almost forgotten diplomatic process. In its essence it is Cold War history like never told before, about a conference that was considered meaningless, but that ultimately changed the world,” he tells BDE.