Interviews

“I was lucky to meet these amazing people who opened their lives to me, their personalities and their universe,” director Giorgi Parkosadze tells BDE of Guri and his mother Sanata, living in a remote mountainous gorge in Georgia and the subjects of the documentary Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer, screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition.

For Sarajevo-born Miroslav Mandic, nature doesn't exist merely to be exploited by the human species. Because when it is, it has a tendency to bite back - with tsunamis, earthquakes or pandemics. In his short film Hug, nature is in the ascendant, its beauty, power and subtlety revealed against a dramatic soundscape which itself finds counterpoint within a dynamic modernist score. The director explains his rationale to Business Doc Europe.

“Kiss the future!” rock star Bono of band U2 shouted at the crowd during the historic concert in Sarajevo in 1997. The city was then emerging from siege and war. It was time, the Irishman was telling them, to look forward after the years of horror. The story behind the concert, and how it happened, is told in the feature doc directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and written by Bill S Carter, who speaks to Business Doc Europe.

The full title of Sovran Nrecaj’s short doc in Sarajevo Competition is Fran and Verka: Or A Usual Day In An Abandoned Village, in which Sovran Nrecaj follows the last two folk left in a tiny parish following the 1999 war in Kosovo. The film is the first of a series of micro-histories from the region that the director wants to tell, “to bring these stories back from under the radar and diversify the already existing narratives,” Nrecaj tells BDE.

In her debut feature doc shot over six years Eléonore Boissinot chronicles the lives of two Muslim sisters in Ahmedabad, a city within the Hindu-majority Indian state of Gujarat. What seems at first a domestic story of teenage frustration evolves into a political rites of passage as the girls come to understand their tragic past and how it was shaped, in 2002, by a sectarian massacre that claimed 69 lives, among them ten members of their own family. The director talks to BDE.

Gutweniger and Kofler’s new documentary, which world-premieres in Locarno Critics Week, observes the behind-the-scenes labour within Italy's Northern Adriatic coastal resorts, both in and out of season. The filmmakers are surprisingly formal in their approach, with their use of a static camera. “We wanted to stand still and watch,” Kofler says. “Everything was rushing and craziness but we wanted stay still in a certain way.”

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.