Sheffield 24

Mancini joins DocFest January 2024 to lead the festival’s industry strategy and activity including Marketplace, with oversight of the festival’s Industry programme and year-round activity. Other new appointments are Sophie Duncan as Marketplace & Talent Programmes Producer, Lisa Marie Russo as Marketplace Consultant, Vanessa Lobón Garcia as Talks and Sessions Senior Producer, and Lieven Heeremans (Podcast Programme Producer).

Dutch director Suzanne Raes discusses her new feature doc about the members of an eccentric, brilliant and sometimes dysfunctional English upper-class family coming to terms with their childhood as they prepare to pack up and leave their ancient, expansive, sprawling home in Oxfordshire. “Of course, the film is not about dragons, but about what the dragon represents; it is about the stories we create around things that frighten us,” says Raes. (Plus trailer)

Relentless Memory, a film about indigenous peoples and human rights, world premieres in International Competition. Piropolis, telling the story of a firefighting company fighting simultaneous devastating fires in Chile, has its European premiere. Meanwhile in MeetMarket, A Troop of Bears is presented. The doc project tells the story of the encounter between the son of a disappeared detainee and the man who betrayed him during the Chilean military dictatorship.

Even in advance of its world premiere in Sheffield, Croatian director Goran Devic’s Pavilion No 6 (sold by Film Harbour) is already being billed as a Covid movie with a difference - a feelgood affair about a feelbad subject that approaches the pandemic in a humorous and surreal way. “I felt that every single individual I met [at the Covid vaccination centre] was happy to communicate. Even the shooting was some kind of communication,” Devic tells BDE.

The impact of economic development in rural Ethiopia is brought strikingly into focus in Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan’s absorbing and fascinating documentary Made in Ethiopia, which explores the grand ambitions for a massive Chinese industrial park in a remote farming town as seen – largely – through the eyes of three very different women, all of whose futures will be hugely affected during the future trajectory of the project.

The UK festival will join forces with the International Documentary Association (IDA) on the Alternate Realities Exhibition and Summit of its 31st edition, taking place 12-17 June 2024. The exhibition will be curated by DocFest Creative Director Raul Niño Zambrano alongside IDA’s Keisha Knight, Director of Funds, and Abby Sun, Director of Artist Programmes, supported by Alternate Realities Programme Producer Jack Rutherford.

Renowned Scottish Oscar-winning actor and artist Tilda Swinton is co-director of The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze, a playful, experimental documentary produced by the Derek Jarman Lab and that looks at learning from every angle. The film, also co-directed by Bartek Dziadosz, screens in the International Competition at Sheffield Doc Fest. As Dziadosz tells BDE, they decided to make a film that would “interrogate” the very idea of education.

For her debut feature, Scottish-based Spanish filmmaker Inma de Reyes follows the young would-be matador Borja as he prepares for a career in the bullring. “I have never been interested in bullfighting,” admits the director. “My family have never taken me to a bullfight or anything like that. I’m just completely oblivious to that world. But I think now you cannot be neutral in Spain. You’re either in favour or you’re against…”

The shocking and extraordinary story of Japanese reality TV star Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi, who was left alone naked in a room for 15 months and whose every move was watched on television by the Japanese public, is told in The Contestant, the startling new documentary by UK director Clair Titley, who talks to Business Doc Europe.

The Whickers, founded in 2015 and named after the legendary British broadcaster and documentarian Alan Whicker, this year celebrates 10 years of collaboration with Sheffield DocFest. On June 16 the annual £100,000 Film and TV Funding Award will be handed out, as well as a £20,000 development prize. June 15 sees The Whickers and Sheffield DocFest Podcast Awards, valued at £5000 and £2000 respectively. Consultant Art Director Jane Ray explains her organisation’s rationale and modus operandi to BDE.