Locarno 24

Ulla and Didi are loving and caring parents, even of a serial killer convicted of nearly 90 murders. In their feature doc, German directors Katharina Köster and Katrin Nemec profile the humble mother and father and their attempts to cope with the dreadful reality of their lives. “The relationship [with their son] is characterised by very strong emotions, between great love and affection, but also between contempt and not being able to forgive,” the directors tell BDE.

Transportation of the vulnerable has been a necessity in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of February 24 2022. So has the transportation of the dead, tragically, as the bodies of fallen soldiers are collected and returned to grieving loved ones. “It's something I never experienced before. It's something I had never seen before. I wanted to dig into this topic as a human being and also as a filmmaker, to explore it and also to tell about it,” director Juri Rechinsky tells BDE.

Claudia Marschal’s feature documentary tells a story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and of one man’s refusal to be silenced over the wrongs he had to suffer. It is also the story of a dad whose life is filled with regrets having not taken seriously his son’s pleas for help. At the heart of the film is a recorded deposition that victim/survivor Emmanuel Siess made to the French police. Director Claudia Marschal, Emmanuel’s cousin, talks to BDE.

Thirteen years after his award-winning Two Years at Sea (2011) Ben Rivers returns to the Scottish highlands to chronicle the life of hermit Jake Williams. “I started seeing new details and thinking about what big major changes the world had been through,” Rivers tells BDE of his initial delay to shooting. “It was interesting that his [Jake’s] life somehow remained quite untouched and intact. That turned it around for me - and then I was fine!”