Interviews

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.

The Czech director went to the Arctic settlement of Longyearbyen to film the work of social scientist, Zdenka Sokolícková, who was studying the impact of climate change on the local people. “From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to tell a rather an intimate story seen from the perspective of Zdenka…But I couldn’t know at the time how the story would develop…” the filmmaker tells BDE.

“Although I follow political and economic news closely, I was not at all an expert on the issue of tax evasion,” admits Yannick Kergoat about his new doc Tax Me If You Can. “[But] I became one after several months of investigation.” The film addresses how mindboggling levels of tax evasion have become an essential mechanism of neo-liberal globalisation. Thankfully, the French director is anything but evasive with BDE.

Swiss filmmaker Lisa Gerig talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film The Hearing, selected for European Film Promotion’s The Changing Face of Europe programme, which sees four asylum seekers swap roles with their bureaucratic inquisitors, and in the process question the entire asylum process itself. "To me, it was always important that it was not a film about these four life stories, but a film about our system,” she says.

Scottish filmmaker Jane McAllister’s film chronicles a seismic moment in recent Scottish history, the ultimately doomed campaign for independence. The central character in the film is her dad Fraser, a Scottish National Party councilor. As soon as the director attended one of her father’s meetings, she was obsessed. “It felt like history was happening. I felt like I was in a position to document it. So I carried on from there,” she tells BDE.