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.”

With precious little source material to work with – a mere 5 seconds of footage, a few photos and a handful of letters – how do you make a documentary about a woman who headed up one of Italy’s leading galleries, had a towering intellect and displayed uncommon wartime bravery, and whose influence over the culture and politics of post-WW2 Italy was substantial? Filmmakers Francesco Clerici and Mattia Colombo, whose Anatomy of a Portrait world-premieres at Venice FF, explain how to BDE.

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.

Erik Shirai unveils the secretive world of sumo in his new feature documentary, world-premiering in Venice and opening the festival’s Spotlight section. The film is, in equal parts, refined, elegiac and minimalist. “Two men on a dirt ring trying to fight each other, half naked. There's nothing more minimal or simpler than that.” Shirai tells Business Doc Europe.

Julia Loktev’s new film begins just two days after its predecessor (My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow) ended, the point at which the last remaining independent media outfits in Russia were shut down. Some of the journalists head to Istanbul, others to Israel or Georgia. Some ended up in Prague or Vienna. “History happened and I kept shooting directly, when everybody fled Russia. I followed them and I just kept shooting,” Loktev tells BDE. “I had this incredible opportunity to capture this historic moment as it was happening.”

Citizen Osama Al-Ashi is an internationally recognised journalist and war photographer in Gaza. He isn’t reckless but he is very courageous, and many times we see him walking towards the tanks, towards the frontline, towards the billowing clouds of smoke, while everyone else is walking or running in the opposite direction. Because that’s his job. And his job is important. Citizen Osama is not an art film. Its style is basic, its storytelling straightforward. But these images have come to us at a very high cost. And we should not look away.

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…”

Paris-based Italian director Giuseppe Schillaci talks to Business Doc Europe about his new feature documentary, world-premiering in Venice, which recalls a period in the 1980s when a programme of regenerative investment in a run-down Paris housing estate led to a glorious spike in community empowerment and connection. It was “an intimate yet collective moment of solidarity and social transformation - before the banlieues went up in flames,” he says.

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.