Interviews

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.

Petra Seliškar’s Body, about her lifelong friendship with her best friend Urška both in their carefree days and after Urška was struck down by auto-immune disease, has its Macedonian premiere August 21 following its world-premiere last week in Sarajevo. “I tried to focus on the inner development of [Urška’s] disease…her inner struggle and what really happened to her body,” Seliškar tells Business Doc Europe.

In the powerful and moving I’m Still Here, which world-premieres August 19, we are returned to the early days of the pandemic as the plight of London’s homeless is addressed full-on by the community aid organisation Under One Sky. In the film we meet some of the capital’s homeless, and the volunteers who dedicate their time to help alleviate the suffering on the streets. Co-director Franc Vissers talks to BDE.

In their debut feature doc My Muslim Husband the filmmakers, a married couple, turn their camera on themselves. “In the beginning, I thought it was going to be easy. We would film something and then we would have a movie. That was not the case. It was much more complicated,” Lizeta observes to BDE of what turned out to be a deeply personal and complex affair.

When, 12 years ago, Goran Dević turned up at a railway station in the Balkans to start filming a bitter strike, he thought he was simply doing research for a fiction script. Little did he know it would turn into a feature doc selected for Sarajevo Doc Competition. “They opened themselves to me from the first moment they saw me,” Dević remembers of the union leaders he got to know. “After that, I stayed with them.”

Five new projects were pitched August 14 during Cinelink’s Docu Rough Cut Boutique, the regional platform dedicated to upcoming documentaries at advanced editing stage. Organised in three modules (Budapest, Sofia, and Sarajevo) the projects compete for a slew of cash and in-kind prizes. “There are so many interesting and relevant stories to be told, and the world wants to know these stories,” programme head Rada Sešic told BDE.