Venice 24

Within a beautifully structured series of artful, dramatic vignettes and provocative, and often haunting, interviews, Errol Morris confronts head-on the frightening and brutal chapter in American history when the Trump administration oversaw (as one interviewee puts it) “state-created orphans” as it set in place a family separation policy that saw illegal migrant families left traumatised as children were forcibly removed from their parents.

Academy Award nominee Petra Costa’s new film investigates the toxic link between evangelical Christianity and political governance within her home country of Brazil, most notably during the regime of Jair Bolsonaro. The doc presents the former-president as almost puppet-like in his devotion to the firebrand tele-evangelist Silas Malafaia. “We knew they had an intimate political relationship, but as we watched the material, it became so evident the kind of subservience and reverence that Bolsonaro had for Malafaia,” says Costa, who is joined in interview by producer Alessandra Orofino.

The idea for Swedish Goran Hugo Olsson’s new feature doc, screening Out of Competition, came after he was given access to public TV archives, when he realised just how much material there was about Palestine and Israel. All the time, he says, there were idealists on both sides trying hard to come up with models for co-existence in the region, the director laments to Business Doc Europe. “It’s a takeaway that so many people had these ideas and we could have been in a totally different situation…All the people who are most aggressive, most violent - they have prevailed.”

New docs by such heavyweights as Petra Costa, Amos Gitai, Asif Kapadia, Kevin Macdonald and Errol Morris play in the Out of Competition Non-fiction sidebar, while Wang Bing’s Youth - Homecoming gets the nod for Venezia 81 Competition. Orrizonti Competition hosts the feature docs Wishing On A Star by Péter Kerekes and Mistress Dispeller by Elizabeth Lo. A further nine docs on cinema are selected for Venice Classics.