Interviews

In the Synthetic Sincerity lab, researchers are looking to inject authenticity into AI characters, using characters from director Marc Isaacs’ own documentaries to do so. In return, they allow him to film the process. In his own playful way, Isaacs is asking some very challenging questions about our evolving relationship with AI, and where reality begins and ends. That said, the documentary may be hi-tech in concept, but decidedly low in budget. “I made this film for £8,000. There is something about the independence that gives you,” Isaacs tells Business Doc Europe.

The 66th edition of Krakow Film Festival opens May 31 with Marc Isaacs’ Synthetic Sincerity, ahead of seven days of frenetic doc activity, both for public and Industry. During the festival, one of the oldest events within the international calendar dedicated to doc (and animation), audiences have the opportunity to watch around 200 films from across the planet, with documentaries competing in International and National Competitions. Festival director Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła and Artistic Director Anita Piotrowska talk to Business Doc Europe.

The third edition of Doxumentale, Berlin’s celebration of all things documentary, kicks off May 27, running through to June 7. “Positive stories are still happening despite the despair of our world,” Artistic Director Anna Ramskogler-Witt tells Business Doc Europe before doors open on the 2026 roll-out. “And I think we need them as an inspiration…I think we are trying to offer insights and spaces for conversations, and inviting exchange. And whoever wants to join is very welcome."

As Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG) looks back on another record-breaking edition, festival head Artur Liebhart argues that documentary cinema’s challenges remain unchanged — but so do its opportunities. Running May 8–17 across Warsaw and seven other Polish cities before continuing online until June 2, this year’s edition unfolded against a familiar backdrop of industry concern: shrinking financing, cautious platforms and an increasingly competitive documentary landscape. Yet if anxiety was in the air, so too was a determination to keep building international bridges. BDE reports.

n Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough, the eponymous author of Transpotting is followed by director Paul Sng through a period of transition. The film, which screened at Millennium Docs Against Gravity, presents Welsh as an artist looking back at fame, excess, class, music, sport, drugs and mortality, while still searching for new creative directions. It was a process that Wesh found illuminating. “I think documentaries in some ways are probably the most counter-cultural,” Welsh told Business Doc Europe. “Because they’re generally independently produced. And that lends itself to a kind of freedom that a lot of filmmakers in fictional cinema don’t really have.”

Cherished Hollywood star, dedicated runner and raconteur extraordinaire, Bruce Dern is, as director Mike Mendez notes, also a law unto himself. What’s more he is, in an American sense, somewhat posh. “It’s not in the movie but Eleanor Roosevelt babysat him!” Mendez tells BDE. “It continues throughout his life. He is always next to greatness. Whether it is Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock or Quentin Tarantino, his entire life, he always rides along greatness…I kind of look at him like a real-life Forrest Gump.”

David and Liani Greaves, son and grand-daughter of pioneering filmmaker William Greaves, were in Cannes this week with their towering film in which, back in 1972, some of the most important still-surviving figures of the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ the flowering of African-American authors, artists, musicians and intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s, attended a dinner party at Duke Ellington’s beautiful New York townhouse…and talked. David and Liana sat down with BDE for a little more talking, about the film (which world-premiered at Sundance) and the 50-year journey to complete it.

French director Tom Fontenille talks to Business Doc Europe about his deeply personal feature documentary A Secret Heart, world-premiering May 20, which chronicles both his father’s transition into a woman [Lilou) and Tom’s own journey of acceptance, together with his sister Manon. Tom remembers when his dad suggested to his son that he would prefer to be portrayed on camera as a woman, rather than a man. “It was on that day that the film was born and the shooting truly began,” Tom underlines.

In her feature documentary, prominent filmmaker, actress and activist Pegah Ahangarani reflects on her turbulent experiences and those of her family in post-revolution Iran over the last 40 years. “International recognition is always enjoyable - but I am really, really aiming this film at my own people, the Iranian people,” she tells BDE. “Especially now because now they are in such darkness, such despair, I think they might need a small reminder of their own courage, their own persistence in this fight…I do hope they have the chance to see it.”

In The Match, Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco revisit one of the greatest, and most controversial, games of football ever played, the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England. The match took place just a few years after the two countries went to war over the Malvinas (the Falklands) “We wanted to tell a balanced story about these two nations. It’s beyond football,” co-director Cabral tells BDE.