Venice 26

Veteran Israeli artist and director Amos Gitai returns to Venice with his latest feature documentary, The Road to Jericho, a poetic meditation on conflict in the Middle East and the diminishing prospects for peace. The director tells Business Doc Europe how he regards culture as “one of the only channels which is remaining to create a dialogue.” That is why he so opposes cultural boycotts. “If you block any form of dialogue, then, OK, let’s go to the next war. I think channels of dialogue always should remain open.”

In Luke Lorentzen’s sublime meditation both on community and competence, we meet some of the workers at the 60-strong Brooklin boatyard who, over four seasons, are tasked with building a 56-foot luxury sailboat. It is a film populated almost exclusively by men. “I think it just emerged...how they treat one another, and how they are men who are both very strong and very sensitive,” Lorentzen tells BDE. “They just have a spirit to them that I really enjoyed being with, and that felt different from the [male] ego or power or dominance that we often see in our culture.”

Sophie Fiennes is back with her latest Pervert’s Guide, once again made with the maverick Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and movie lover, Slavoj Zizek. “I think the absurd is something he embraces,” Fiennes says of Zizek’s freewheeling approach. “It’s a reflection of him being a person who is an outsider, a free thinker - and the deadpan comedy of it is particular to him. I never know what is going to happen when I put him in those situations. I have no idea. It’s an experiment.”

Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s 25-minute ‘horror’ film, which started shooting in January this year, shows ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents terrorising the residents of Minneapolis. “We knew it had to be filmed then,” Poitras tells BDE. “It [the US] is a country that has violence at its core; it has empire at its core, and it is engaging in violence [all the time],” she adds.

Filmmakers Vasarhelyi and Chin discuss their audacious new feature doc in which mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson plan to climb, together with Chin, the North Face of Mount Everest, before skiing back down the way they came. “You can shape and define your fate to a certain degree. We all think that as humans we get to decide everything. We don’t,” Chin tells BDE. “There is only so much you can control…”

The Soviet Union is revealed in all its contradictions in Sergei Loznitsa’s sprawling new archive-based documentary Imperium (screening this week in Venice Open - Out of Competition). The footage he uses was shot by Italian filmmakers in the early 1970s. They travelled to every corner of the Soviet empire, from major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg to far flung towns in central Asia; from Ukraine to the Baltics, from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan. The Ukrainian director talks to Business Doc Europe.

In her new doc, world-premiering in Venice before its North American premiere at TIFF, the revered double-Oscar winner is back on the picket line, focusing on the UPS drivers, Amazon employees and app-based bike delivery workers who are keeping the city of New York ticking over. Their working conditions, however, are often deplorable. “It’s a world where the ‘deliveristas’ have absolutely nothing. They have to buy their gloves, their motorcycles or their bikes. Beyond that, they have to look over their shoulders now to make sure that ICE is not trailing them,” Kopple tells BDE.

In his new 3D feature doc, Wim Wenders profiles the work of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The parallels between architecture and filmmaking are obvious, points out Wenders, who works in a similar way to his illustrious subject. A house, he believes, “is a story,” and in a film, each shot can be regarded as “a brick in time” out of which scenes and then entire movies are built. “I don’t think the movie is remotely there when you have a script. Actually, I don’t think it is there at all. It is only in the shooting process that the film takes shape,” he adds.

Ryan Holliger dreams of making a film about his chaotic life, one in which he served 4 years in prison and fathered six kids with five women. Fellow school dad Robert Greene decides to help him in this quest as he feels a special kinship with Ryan, both having grown up in broken homes in working-class areas. “But the difference between he and I is he likes to fight, so he punched someone in the face a bunch of times and went to prison. I don't like to fight. I like to write poetry and make paintings and eventually I made movies, and that's where our lives diverged,” Greene tells BDE.

Director Victor Kossakovsky and botanist Stefano Mancuso take viewers on an unprecedented journey into the life of trees. As Kossakovsky tells BDE, when he was three or four years old, growing up in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, he was shown a leaf by his mother. She explained how trees are highly complex and sensitive organisms. “It is my first memory of myself,” Kossakovsky tells BDE of this early nature lesson.