Interviews

Prolific Scottish producer Sonja Henrici, who will be deliberating over docs in First Film Competition in 2023, discusses her slate of new films and projects, which include Finlay Pretsell’s upcoming Douglas Gordon: Self Divided, about the maverick Turner Prize winning Scottish artist, and a brace of films on mental health, one of which, Amy Hardie’s film Untitled Love Story, had a rough cut screening earlier this week in Sheffield.

In Melanie Manchot’s feature debut, a recovering alcohol and substance addict re-enacts moments from his own chaotic past life as he takes on the acting role of historical embezzler Thomas Goudie, whose public arrest in 1901 was reconstructed on celluloid (BFI Archive). Part observational doc and part fiction, all the support roles in STEPHEN are played by former or recovering addicts. “The shoot was probably the best three and a half weeks of my life,” Manchot tells BDE. “And I think for most of the cast as well.”

At Sheffield 2023 Business Doc Europe spoke with Irena Taskovski, CEO and founder of Taskovski Films, a production and sales outfit based in London and currently celebrating its 20th year of activity. The company CEO described her journey so far, and shared insights into her current editorial policy and approach to the business of doc.

“I had been making a series about the National Trust in England and got tired of being lied to, and I thought I would go and make a series in Russia about the oligarchs,” filmmaker Patrick Forbes remembers the unlikely sequence of events more than two decades ago which led to his first meeting with Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov for the first time.

Cornwall-based filmmaker Christopher Morris talks to BDE about his debut feature, made at the ripe old age of 60 and located within a field with a single standing stone. “I can’t describe why but there is something about that field, something about the position of the stone in relation to the sea and the surrounding landscape,” the director observes of the uncanny power of the place.

In his latest film, Dutch director Marc Schmidt looks at how mental sensibilities are treated and/or prevented in different societies: the Netherlands, Norway and the US. “My interest in these themes is not just coming from my personal background, but is also intellectually motivated: what other ways are there to receive reality, than the shared reality of daily life, based on causality?”

When Swedish Maria Fredriksson was contacted by two sisters about their discovery of a twin of their older sister who had committed suicide more than 30 years before, little did the docmaker know that this was just the beginning of an increasingly dark journey into the unknown. Fredriksson talks to BDE about a film that packs more jaw-dropping WTF moments into its 100 minutes than are humanly imaginable.

Netherlands-based Ukrainian filmmaker Mariia Ponomarova talks about her new doc which was developed, shot and now completed in the year since Sheffield 2022. The film focuses on three windows of her old family apartment in Kyiv, as we hear the director’s mother, friends and a former lover reminiscing on the soundtrack. “It was necessary for me to do something quite quickly because it was important and dear to me. It is quite a personal story and I had to externalise it.”

Fictional newsrooms in movies don’t have half the tension and excitement of the one shown in Indian director Vinay Shukla’s feature documentary While We Watched (a UK premier in Sheffield Doc Fest’s Rebellions strand). The film follows charismatic Hindi TV news journalist Ravish Kumar, a figure with a gravitas and authority reminiscent of US journalist Ed Murrow. Director Shukla talks to Business Doc Europe.

It was a documentary expected to be made in three months. Dalton’s Dream (a world premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest on June 15) ended up taking over four years. When effervescent young pansexual Jamaican singer Dalton Harris won UK TV talent show The X-Factor in 2018, directors Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown planned to film him as he launched his career in earnest as a recording artist. Until real life in the form of acute homophobia intervened...