Interviews

Beldocs key personnel discuss the 16th edition of the Belgrade doc fest, presented this year in the shadow of two horrendous mass shootings that the country has recently suffered. “In the current deeply sensitive, complex and truly heart-breaking moment our society in Serbia is facing, we believe Beldocs-curated creative documentaries can bring us very close together, guide us to face crises and overcome trauma in a creative way.”

What makes a nice, young middle-class Dutch woman want to join a revolutionary struggle thousands of miles from home? Marcel Mettelsiefen’s probing new feature doc tells the story of Tanja Nijmeijer, the former teacher who became a member of the Colombian FARC rebel group. “It is a film which gives a voice to a conflict in a country which is divided, a country stuck in 50 years of violence… told through the emotional story of Tanja,” the director tells BDE.

Paula Maľárová tells BDE how many fellow Slovakians convince themselves that they will not "repeat the mistakes" of previous generations. But, as her doc shows, war still permeates every part of Slovakian society, with numerous film and TV dramas on the subject and military parades and exercises. Yet almost everyone treats these activities as if they are games, she says. In her new film Maľárová sets out to show the distorted way in which children are being taught “what war is.”

Filmmaker and journalist Katja Baumgarten tells the fraught and complex story of a midwife (and advocate of home deliveries) who was put on trial following the still-birth of a baby. “Who will it help to send the midwife and doctor to prison for years?” Baumgarten, also a midwife, stresses to BDE of the “crazy” jail sentence that the court laid down. “It wasn’t reality. It was the fantasy of the judges,” she alleges.

It’s 25 years since Esther van Messel founded First Hand Films, her Zurich-based world sales, distribution and production outfit. “To be commercial and subversive at the same time, to change the world and have fun doing it,” is the van Messel mantra. Now she is marking the company’s quarter century anniversary with the launch of the First Hand Fund Diversity Call, a fund valued at €25,000. She explains all to BDE.

Seven or eight years ago, after her grandmother died, Estonian filmmaker Liis Nimik began to think deeply about the life the old lady had lived. Her grandmother certainly wasn’t wealthy but she “always had everything she needed and peace in her heart,” Nimik observes to BDE. In her new documentary Sundial, which world-premiered at Visions du Réel, Nimik looks for other Estonians living in the same calm and contented way as her grandma.

A gently sympathetic and generous portrait of a young Lithuanian woman meandering through life as she looks for a sense of direction, Elena Kairyte’s modestly staged film Roberta is easy to watch though never becomes revelatory, and at times lacks dynamism, relying instead on the main character’s warm-hearted nature and sense of optimism.

In After Work, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

A badly neglected episode in recent German history is the injustice meted out to Mozambicans who travelled to the GDR to work and study during the Cold War but who were forced to head back to Africa when the Wall came down. “I was shocked and I didn’t know about it,” director Brenda Akele Jorde tells Business Doc Europe. “Germany just doesn’t talk about it.”

The Irish documentary Vicky tells a tale of bravery and determination in the face of gross negligence within the Irish health system. Back in 2011, Vicky Phelan was given the all-clear after a smear test, just like hundreds of other women. But many of these results were wrong, despite incontestable evidence of pre-cancerous cells or abnormalities, ultimately leading to many deaths. Director Sasha King discusses her film with BDE.