Interviews

It sounds like something out of a Michael Mann film. Iván Simonovis, formerly one of Venezuela’s top police officers, is under strict house arrest on trumped up charges. He cuts off the security tag on his ankle, clambers down a very high wall, is spirited away by well-wishers, goes into hiding and eventually escapes Venezuela on a speed boat. His son Iván discusses with BDE the film he made of his father’s extraordinary life.

Emilie Bujès, head of the Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel, outlines the appeal of an event that does more than most to extend the boundaries of documentary. The festival presents 163 films in 2023, and special guests include international luminaries Lucrecia Martel and Alice Rohrwacher, and Swiss director Jean-Stéphane Bron. “It’s more ‘visions’ than ‘réel’ in terms of what we are interested in,” Bujès tells BDE. “It’s more people looking at something, rather than the something itself.”

Last week CPH:DOX hosted a chat with Academy Award-winning US documentary filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin who discussed their latest endeavour, Wild Life, produced by National Geographic Films. The conversation was moderated by Thom Powers, programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, co-founder of DOC NYC and host of the Pure Non Fiction podcast.

CPH:DOX last week hosted a conversation on the craft of doc with two brilliant women filmmakers – Estonia’s Anna Hints, director of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood and Chile’s Maite Alberdi, director of The Eternal Memory, both Sundance-winning films. The talk, moderated by film journalist Wendy Mitchell, focused on these docs, in particular on their protagonists’ vulnerability, the directors’ sense of moral compass and some of their artistic and technical choices.

On March 20 CPH:DOX hosted a 90-minute conversation between Academy Award, BAFTA and Grammy winning British director Asif Kapadia and Thom Powers, programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, co-founder of DOC NYC and host of the Pure Non Fiction podcast. The event was part of the Morning with Filmmakers initiative organised by the festival.

At the heart of Damsgård & Klovborg’s film about the ISIS kidnapping of Danish photographer Daniel Rye is an incendiary interview, conducted by journalist Sean Langan, with two of the British kidnappers, infamously known as the Beatles. “As an interviewer, he makes just about every mistake in the handbook, but still he somehow succeeds in getting something to happen in that room that’s hard to explain,” says Klovborg.

Welcome to Funky Town, the hippest club in Chengdu, China, and the centre of the city’s thriving underground party scene. The documentary came about after Yihao, one of director Mullinkosson’s most flamboyant friends, discovered he was a filmmaker. “He asked when I would film him. I said how about Saturday night?” the director tells BDE.

As we see within each tableau vivant of Anna Hints’ Sundance-winning doc, the Estonian smoke sauna is a place for physical, emotional and psychological cleansing, for revelation and for wonderful storytelling. “That is the magic. You go into this smoke sauna and you don't care…it’s the space [where] somebody tells and somebody listens,” the director tells BDE.

“I think I decided 10 years ago that I was done with filming…that there was no reason for a guy like me to go around capturing [images] Robert Flaherty-style,” maverick Swedish co-director Göran Hugo Olsson tells BDE. He wanted to collaborate, so when the opportunity to work with artist Roxy Farhat came along, he grabbed it with both hands. “And the rest is history,” says Farhat.

Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim has been in Copenhagen this week with his new feature, Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, about the eponymous Hollywood star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1990s. “When Michael and I started working together, he asked for only one thing…The thing he asked for is no violins. He didn’t want a maudlin, pitying film about a person with a sickness,” Guggenheim tells BDE.