Venice 25

Leading Argentine director Lucrecia Martel takes the plunge into documentary with her latest feature, a complex and hard-hitting story about the murder of an Indigenous community leader and the community’s subsequent fight for justice on his behalf. “It is very important to convey to young people that filmmaking and cinema can have a huge power,” Martel tells Business Doc Europe. “They can use it for good or bad reasons but it has a huge power - and I’ve never felt it so much as in this film.”

The Dutch/Afghan filmmaker discusses his riveting new documentary, world-premiering in Venice, which immerses the audience in the daily lives of a young Taliban solider and his teenage brother. “My film depicts the effect of war on people,” says Amini. “Not only the war in Afghanistan, it's the war everywhere. War is not only destructive for cities, buildings, houses, hospitals and roads. It also destroys the souls of people generation after generation after generation.”

Revered US director Ross McElwee’s new documentary is a deeply painful exploration of his relationship with his son, Adrian, who died suddenly in late 2016 after a drugs overdose. “It has the opposite effect of therapy. It makes me more anxious about living,” McElwee tells Business Doc Europe, when asked if making the film was a cathartic experience. In the case of Remake, there is “no consolation that I can fathom at this point: no consolation in making this film, little consolation in actually working on it.”

Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus’s feature doc Cover-Up tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning Seymour Hersh and his relentless investigative reporting - from the My Lai massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, from Nixon and Watergate to the sabotage of the Nord Stream platform. “He was, I think, the most important voice of dissent in national security reporting,” co-director Poitras tells Business Doc Europe.

For his new feature doc, Swiss/American filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe turns once more to Hollywood, this time profiling Kim Novak, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid. The director thinks audiences will be surprised by Novak’s openness and generosity of spirit. “She reveals aspects of herself she has never revealed before. There is an incredible amount of vulnerability. That’s all credit to her. She took a massive leap of faith.”

“Because I am alive!” Alexander Sokurov replies quietly to Business Doc Europe when asked what led him to embark on his monumental new, five-hour long archive-based documentary, Director’s Diary. In the film, sold by Films Boutique and a world premiere Out of Competition in Venice, the 74-year-old Russian director takes viewers on an epic but very personal journey through late Soviet history.

A beautifully mounted documentary-fable, The Tale of Silyan is an astute blend of environmental messaging and magical realism, all tightly structured and crafted to offer up an easy to watch (and economical) film that at times feels more like a genial folk tale than a movie with a hard-hitting eco message. That said, within Kotevska’s unique construction the whole thing works rather wonderfully.

He may have been sentenced in absentia to eight and a half years in jail by the Russian authorities, but Ukrainian producer and director Alexander Rodnyansky continues to work while in exile in LA, where he made his new feature documentary world premiering at Venice 2025. “It is a story of an unending conflict but of a deep, enduring hope that one day the war will end,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “This is what the film is about. I believe this experience is shared by many, many families around the globe.”

Directors Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard talk to Business Doc Europe about their hybrid documentary featuring the late Marianne Faithfull. “Consistently over the years, she has been lucid and witty and unsuffering of fools, and has stood up for her own work…I think she'd have really enjoyed the way in which all of these versions of herself over the years, participate actively in the film.”

Jihan K’s father Mansur Rashid Kikhia was a human rights lawyer, Libya’s foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations. But he was also opposed to then-Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi. Mansur disappeared on a trip to Cairo in 1993 while attending a human rights conference. Director Jihan was six when her father went missing. “I'm dealing with a real existential crisis where my father is stuck in the dream realm,” she tells BDE. “The film is a tool to make something concrete out of my father, to create a portrait of my father.”