Interviews

Does the subject or ‘star’ of a documentary really know what they are signing up for before agreeing to have their story told? Will the experience be cathartic or will ongoing public exposure determine that the trauma they have hitherto suffered will continue, or even intensify. Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s new film, five years in the making, talks to the subjects of some the most celebrated documentaries of recent years who reflect on their experiences of being in front of the camera.

Intrepid 52-year-old Bosnian athlete and filmmaker Tomislav Cvitanušić, a basketball star in Sarajevo as a youngster, recently made climbing Everest, the world’s highest mountain, his goal. His ascent is chronicled in new documentary, The Deepest Summit, screening this weekend at AJB Doc. Was there an ulterior motive? “To steal some of the media space from the everyday politics that is always quite pessimistic in the Balkans,” he tells BDE.

Parma-based filmmaker Matteo Ferrarini explains that Spring in Mariupol (screening in Competition in AJB Doc) is intended to give a very different perspective on the Ukrainian war than that provided by most of the western mainstream media. Many western journalists visited Mariupol during the siege but most left after a couple of days. Maurizio stayed put for the whole of the spring, he tells BDE, trying to understand what the city’s residents were enduring. The siege lasted until late May.

This year TIFF Docs presents 22 titles from 12 countries, 13 of which are world-premieres. The section opens September 7 with Copa 71 by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, about the unofficial Women's World Cup tournament of over 50 years ago hitherto written out of history. TIFF Docs Lead Programmer Thom Powers discusses his programme rationale with BDE.

Celine Daemen is back in Venice with 'Songs for a Passerby', described as a VR opera about our tenuous relationship with the transitory nature of reality. “I have attempted to create an experience that investigates the connection between the physical and the metaphysical world,” director Daelen says of her new work. In 2022 she presented the VR 'Eurydice, a Descent into Infinity' at the Venice interactive sidebar.

Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost world-premiering in Venice, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists” director Morabito tells BDE of his subject.

Queer feminist filmmaker Julia Fuhr Mann freely admits that she loves sports. She watches football and athletics. What infuriates her, though, is the gender stereotyping in the TV sports coverage and the patronising attitude toward queer, trans and intersex athletes. The director discusses her debut feature doc with Business Doc Europe.

Paris-based French-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film that documents the lives of women across four generations within her family, one of whom is the internationally renowned actress Hiam Abbass, the director’s mother. “It's as if the women of my family…each represent a piece of history, a piece of time that doesn't exist anymore,” says Soualem.

The legendary Hollywood filmmaker is profiled in the new documentary by UK docmaker Matthew Wells, who has previously profiled other such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick. “I was really…interested in the symbolism of Frank Capra’s rags to riches story, what it came to mean and how that resonates with his movies,” Wells tells BDE of his contradictory subject.

Almost 50 years ago, the Oscar-winning French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau turned up at Panama’s San Blas islands intending to make a film about the Kuna community there. But the film was never shown, and more or less forgotten about until, quite by accident, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot heard of its existence and determined not only to track it down but to finally screen it to the Kuna folk half a century later.