Interviews

In her intriguingly titled 40-minute (…), Dutch director Karina Beumer seeks to remind her loving father Ron of her existence after he develops Acquired Brain Injury, a debilitating condition which deprives him of long and short-term memory. “My first goal was to make the film from my father's perspective,” says Beumer. “But of course, it's my psychological perspective too…”

New York-based artist and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins has been collecting physical publicity slides from movies for a number of years. These stills are used in ingenious fashion in his new project Still Film (an international premiere at Visions). As the images, some of them very familiar, are projected on screen, a voice is heard on the soundtrack talking about memory, technology and cinema. The director talks to BDE.

Ahead of Dartmouth Films’ May 26 release across UK & Ireland of Alastair Evans’ A Crack in the Mountain, the company’s Christopher and Matt Hird explain the success of their approach to the release of doc, such as Margy Kinmonth’s Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War, second only (in documentary box-office terms) to Moonage Daydream in 2022. The trick is to identify the core audience and find a route to that audience. “If the core audience likes it, they spread the word to a wider audience,” Matt Hird explains.

Portuguese Catarina Mourão’s new doc, world premiering at Visions du Réel, looks at an extraordinary, long concealed chapter in the life of its protagonist, Martim Santa Rita Masasri. Now in his late 50s, Martim was 15 he went to live and study in the Soviet Union, in Astrakan where he discovered sex and alcohol and fell deeply in love. When he returned to Portugal he bore deep psychological scars. The director explains more to BDE.

Visions du Réel Industry kicks off April 23 ahead of 5 days of intense but ‘relaxed’ activity, Industry head Sophie Bourdon tells BDE. Professionals will gather to do business, but they can also “step back a bit” from the renewed freneticism that inevitably followed the lifting of Covid restrictions. In 2023, 31 project teams from 32 countries will discuss their new and upcoming projects within the event’s core pitch and laboratory programmes.

Argentinean director Pedro Speroni discusses his latest documentary, which concerns the charismatic Iván Bilbaos whom the director met when making his previous documentary Rancho (2021), set inside a maximum security prison. Now Bilbaos is out of jail and back with his wife and daughter, making a living as a money lender. “I think it is a film about a guy who is trying to get ahead,” the director says. “Like a boxer, he is always fighting to have a better life.”

It’s clear that Flemish filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke sees traces of himself as a youngster in the 13-year-old Bo, the effervescent main character of his new feature documentary Planet B, a world premiere in Grand Angle at Visions du Réel. She is a teenage climate activist who, together with her friend Luca, throws herself into protests. The director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

It’s an area of bleak, windswept majesty. The border area between Armenia and Azerbaijan has rolling mountains and long, dry plains. It has been the site of constant skirmishes including a 44-day war in 2020. It is also the location for Daniel Kötter’s Landshaft, and the latest of several projects by the German artist and filmmaker that have dealt with what he calls ‘political geography,’ he tells BDE.

Swiss-Canadian director Peter Mettler discusses his epic new feature series While the Green Grass Grows, which is expected eventually to run for up to 12 hours. Parts one and six are an elegy for his parents, whose passing they chronicle. “For me, it’s…almost a way of going through that process; of becoming an orphan, being an only child as well and [with] no other family. It was very much a separation from my family,” the director reflects to BDE on the loss he experienced.

‘A person who dies without a name is like a story without an ending,’ reads the logline for Pure Unknown, screening in VdR Int'l Competition. The core objective of Italian forensic pathologist Cristina Cattaneo, profiled in the film, is to find an ending for as many stories as possible. “I completely fell in love with…her mission and her ethical approach to her work, to her life and to the lives of others,” co-director Mattia Colombo tells BDE.