Interviews

Locarno’s First Look programme of works-in-progress puts the UK in the spotlight in 2023 and one of the six new titles in the frame is All At Sea, the semi-autobiographical documentary of the late Mike Hodges, the 1960s Granada TV docmaker who went on to make fiction features as diverse as the seminal Get Carter and Flash Gordon. The documentary is produced by Liverpool-based Hurricane Films.

Dutch co-producers Naomi Pacifique and Albert Kuhn (Revolver Amsterdam) explain why they boarded the latest film by Eduardo Williams, which follows a meandering group of friends within a rainy, windswept world. The Human Surge 3 was shot using a 360 degree VR helmet-camera before its framing onto a 2D screen through the use of VR goggles.

Represented internationally by Cargo Film & Releasing, Angelos Rallis’ feature doc, about a young orphan who must survive the apocalyptic flooding within Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra region, has been winning awards wherever it has shown. Following its premiere at the Thessaloniki Doc Fest, it recently picked up two prizes at the Giffoni Film Festival. The director discusses the film with BDE.

In examining why the spark in his parents’ marriage has become all but extinguished, Israeli director Ohad Milstein turns his camera on his own relationship with Swiss wife Rahel as both determine how far they are prepared to go to keep their union stimulating. “In the case of this film, I think that our curiosity about the truth is stronger than our fear of exposure,” says the director of his brave, complex and highly revelatory doc.

Stéphane Breton finds subjects for his documentaries “by chance,” he tells Business Doc Europe. The idea for his latest feature Les Premiers Jours [The First Days] came in haphazard fashion after he was invited to the film school in Santiago do Chile. “I discovered the shore, the ocean and I decided to make a film there,” the director remembers. “I am really interested in the relationship between a place and the people.”

It was a shocking case that triggered an international media frenzy. In July 2000, 21-year old Lucie Blackman, from the UK and working as a hostess in a Tokyo bar, went missing. The case was initially baffling to Japanese detectives, but little by little they began to make progress, deciphering clues as to her disappearance and eventually homing in on a key suspect. In his new Netflix doc, Hyoe Yamamoto tells the heart-rending story of the search for Lucie from the detectives’ perspective.

In Rut Sigurðardóttir’s feature documentary, husband Kristján decides to address the couple's debt situation by taking to the cold Atlantic to fish for cod in a small fishing boat using nothing other than a line and a hook. The boat is called Skuld, a word which means debt, or which can be slang for money. As significantly, in Icelandic mythology Skuld was one of the glorious Valkyrie. BDE sails out to net director Sigurðardóttir.

If Thomas Imbach’s parents are to be believed, he was conceived during a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s cult film Breathless (À bout de souffle) some time at the beginning of the ‘60s. This would be the beginning of a lifelong connection to the “God of Cinema” as Imbach likes to call his filmmaking hero. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Bram Ruiter’s experimental short Here & Elsewhere, world-premiering at Karlovy Vary, is both beguilingly simple and satisfyingly complex. It is a work the director describes as “a romantic film in which water is a guiding force for a journey with an unclear destination.” It is also a film that forefronts the lyricism of Jorge Luis Borges and the fragmented observations of Heraclitus.

In 2012, Georgia’s ruling ENM party ran a toothless election campaign – quite literally. In parts of the country voters were enticed into having all their rotten teeth removed, to be replaced with shiny new dentures after the election. The problem was that the ENM party lost, and the incoming Georgian Dream party saw no need to fulfil the promise. Director Luka Beradze chews over questions on his film, as posed by BDE.