Sheffield 23

At Sheffield 2023 Business Doc Europe sat down with Kim Christiansen of DR Sales. DR Sales is the international sales department of the Danish public broadcaster and one of the leading Nordic distributors of high-end audiovisual productions – in particular, the team focuses on award-winning documentaries, drama series and children’s content.

In Misho Antadze’s short documentary Metabolism, selected for Sheffield, robots have taken over some of the functions we inexorably associate with human beings, such as milking cows and waiting on tables. “The observational documentary work that I make, it's mostly because I'm curious. I want to see these things, so making these films is a way of taking a look for myself and obviously to bring the audience with me as well,” Antadze says.

Sheffield DocFest announced June 19 that its 2023 Audience Award has gone to Your Fat Friend, directed/produced by Jeanie Finlay and producer Suzanne Alizart. Exec producers are Charlotte Cook (Field Of Vision) and Doc Society’s Sandra Whipham & Shanida Scotland. “To bring a film home to Sheff DocFest, a festival that I have been coming to and showing films at for 20 years, has been incredibly emotional and meaningful,” said director/producer Finlay.

Prolific Scottish producer Sonja Henrici, who will be deliberating over docs in First Film Competition in 2023, discusses her slate of new films and projects, which include Finlay Pretsell’s upcoming Douglas Gordon: Self Divided, about the maverick Turner Prize winning Scottish artist, and a brace of films on mental health, one of which, Amy Hardie’s film Untitled Love Story, had a rough cut screening earlier this week in Sheffield.

In Melanie Manchot’s feature debut, a recovering alcohol and substance addict re-enacts moments from his own chaotic past life as he takes on the acting role of historical embezzler Thomas Goudie, whose public arrest in 1901 was reconstructed on celluloid (BFI Archive). Part observational doc and part fiction, all the support roles in STEPHEN are played by former or recovering addicts. “The shoot was probably the best three and a half weeks of my life,” Manchot tells BDE. “And I think for most of the cast as well.”

It was a documentary expected to be made in three months. Dalton’s Dream (a world premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest on June 15) ended up taking over four years. When effervescent young pansexual Jamaican singer Dalton Harris won UK TV talent show The X-Factor in 2018, directors Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown planned to film him as he launched his career in earnest as a recording artist. Until real life in the form of acute homophobia intervened...

After being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, filmmaker Kit Vincent sets about enlisting his family on an intimate and darkly humorous journey that he hopes will help them come to terms with his illness. Unsurprisingly, this cinematic journey is more complex, emotional and engagingly offbeat than he might have first intended, and his plan to point the camera anywhere but at himself proves temporary before realising that only he, himself, can be the centre of the film’s story.

Joining December 19 from the BFI’s UK Global Screen Fund, Grundy will be responsible for the fest’s business affairs, partnerships & fundraising, production & operations as well as audience development. The role is a new, joint leadership position and will work collaboratively with Raul Niño Zambrano who has moved into the role of Acting Creative Director.

Get back, hands off, go for it! Producer Simon Halfon discusses his new feature length doc about the great 1980s band Wham, which featured 'young guns' George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. As soon as he pitched his idea, Halfon knew the film was a goer. “Within a heartbeat, we had this dream team of Chris Smith, John Battsek and Kate Townsend (Netflix),” he says.

Netherlands-based Ukrainian filmmaker Mariia Ponomarova talks about her new doc which was developed, shot and now completed in the year since Sheffield 2022. The film focuses on three windows of her old family apartment in Kyiv, as we hear the director’s mother, friends and a former lover reminiscing on the soundtrack. “It was necessary for me to do something quite quickly because it was important and dear to me. It is quite a personal story and I had to externalise it.”