Venice 24

When author and journalist Jacob Soboroff approached revered US documentary director Errol Morris to ask if he knew anyone who might be interested in making a documentary of his 2020 book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris promptly replied, “Yes, me,” he tells BDE. The film details the Trump administration’s viciously cruel and contentious border policy of separating immigrant kids from their parents when they didn’t have the right papers. “It’s an important issue because I hate Trump and I, in particular, hated this policy.”

Italian Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s Bestiari Erbari Lapideri, which world-premieres Sept 3, is a film divided into three acts and which deals with three distinct and fundamental subjects: animals, plants and stones. “It is first and foremost a reflection on the relationship between humans and nature that exists beyond our impact on it,” the filmmakers say of their latest opus. “We build real and imaginary cages to contain it, but nature always evades our attempt to tame it.”

Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel discusses her Venice documentary, world-premiering September 4 and described as “a visual diary of the war from the very first days,” with BDE. “Just psychologically, when you are in the war and you are making a film about the war, it’s quite complicated just to survive. On the other side, this job, this work, this film helped us to keep…sane!” she says.

Elizabeth Lo received rapturous reviews for her debut documentary feature Stray (2020), about stray dogs in Istanbul. Michael Moore called it “a simple work of genius” and it won several awards on the festival circuit. Now, the Hong Kong and LA-based director is back with a project in a very different groove. It’s also about straying - but this time the protagonists are humans cheating on their spouses. The director explains more to BDE.

One hot weekend in 1965 in the US saw three contrasting cultural phenomena. The Beatles arrived to play their iconic Shea Stadium gig, the Watts Riots kicked off in LA and the World Fair was in full swing in Queens, New York. Romanian Andrei Ujică documents this weekend in his rich new documentary, at the same time inserting a fictional romance between two real-life chroniclers of the time. “Small lives are set against the huge backdrop of what's happening in the world,” Ujică, himself an avid Beatles fan, tells Business Doc Europe.

The sheer and awful brutality of war is examined in sprawling artistic fashion by filmmaker Amos Gitai in the simply (and appropriately) titled Why War, using as its spine an exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud which dwelled on violence in the name of religion, race and nationality, but which also takes in art, music, performance and literature. The whole is based on Gitai’s notion of embracing the filmmaker or the artist as a healer.

Prolific Scottish documentary maker Kevin Macdonald takes John Lennon’s compulsive TV watching post-Beatles as the frame for his new film, One to One: John & Yoko, which world-premiered at Venice. We’re put into Lennon’s frame of mind as he tries to figure out what his life should now be. We’re also given a sense of the abuse that Yoko endured from the media and fans post-split. In telling their story, Macdonald was “just using what was in front of me, what was there in audio and archive,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

Andres Veiel’s new documentary, which received its world premiere to rave reviews in Venice this week, makes a damning case against notorious director Leni Riefensthal, whose patron was Adolf Hitler. The film comes at a time when Germany is seeing a wave of right-wing extremism. “[It] is a warning not to accept this new nationalism and celebration of the strong. That is what’s Riefenstahl’s ideology is. We are really experiencing a renaissance of it,” says Veiel, who is joined in interview by producer Sandra Maischberger.

French director Léo Favier talks to Business Doc Europe about his new documentary, world-premiering August 31 in Venice, which profiles the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. “I think the work of animation is pretty particular. You can control everything and I guess you can really be obsessive with the perfectionism of the movement. Also, it’s the Japanese work culture…they really work a lot,” Favier confides. “I have the feeling that he [Miyazaki] gives everything.”

Directed by award-winning Serbian Mladen Kovačević and produced together with Iva Plemić Divjak, the film will have its world premiere at Giornate Degli Autori on September 3. In the film, drawn to a paradise island in the quest for happiness, the protagonists grapple with the endless tensions between life's possibilities, but the question remains if they are living the life they should be living.