Berlin 2024

The feature doc Oasis, which world-premiered in Berlinale Forum paints an evocative (at times provocative) picture of Chile’s recent turbulent history in which the country’s disenfranchised communities demanded the country’s constitution be rewritten better to meet their needs. “Our documentary raises questions about issues that are universal and reflect the challenges that all of humanity is facing,” says co-director Uribe.

In its ninth year, the February 19 Face to Face With German Films showcase seeks to increase the visibility of German filmmakers by presenting them to leading international players attending Berlinale. One of the German talents this year is Hamburg-based multi award-winning documentary filmmaker Moritz Müller-Preißer who will be presenting his feature debut God’s Other Plan in early 2024. He talks to Business Doc Europe.

It’s a special year for Italy, the Country in Focus at Berlinale 2024. Business Doc Europe reached out to Massimo Arvat, of Doc/it, Italy’s National Association of Docmakers, to discuss the non-fiction-related initiatives in place, the titles present in the official selection and most importantly, the current state of Italian documentary and Doc/it’s move towards greater internationalisation.

Legendary Bronx-born US indie director Abel Ferrara was in Berlin this weekend with his new feature doc Turn In The Wound (screening as a Berlinale special). The film offers a portrait of the Ukrainian people at war and includes testimony about their horrific experiences after the full-scale invasion. “I don’t believe in the devil but when you read about and see these things up front, close up and personal, you’ve got to entertain the idea [that evil exists],” he tells BDE.

In his new film At Averroès & Rosa Parks (screening this week as a Berlinale Special), French documentary master Nicolas Philibert continues his exploration of mental illness and its treatments in French hospitals. “Making movies is my solution to keep balance in my life,” the director tells BDE. “The people I film are very vulnerable but they reflect back something I have inside me too.”

Told in five distinct acts that span the period between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation undertaken by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her story is told using approximately 3000 still photographs and the diaries she kept from those years.

A moving, immersive and prescient documentary, No Other Land details the eradication of the villages in the Masafer Yatta area on the Southern West Bank over a period of years, as seen from the perspective of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist/journalist brought up in Masafer Yatta, and Yuval, an Israeli journalist who supports him in his efforts to bring attention to what is happening to the community.

Earlier this month incumbent DAE executive board members Brigid O’Shea and Julianna Ugrin were re-elected for another 3-year term following the online vote of DAE members. Speaking to Business Doc Europe at Berlinale (where DAE was launched in 2020) O’Shea underlined once more the organisation’s raison d’être. “We are vocal, outspoken and in the ears of decision makers on our members' behalf; we are fighting for the best conditions for documentary filmmaking every day!”

Rotterdam-based filmmaker Sara Rajaei’s City of Poets is a short hybrid work that reflects on the countless inequities suffered by women. It is a film both deeply melancholic and shot through with a magical realist aesthetic. “At the same time the film is addressing something real. Something of our contemporary history and things that I experienced during my childhood and that I still experience. So yes, it is a fairy-tale, but it is about something much larger, much more universal.”

Filmmaker Abel Ferrara takes a personal journey into the heart of Ukraine as he attempts to deal with own confusion about what is happening in the country. Blending interviews with those who have experienced the conflict close up, archival footage and material of Patti Smith recording songs and poetry, Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound is a meanderingly personal examination into the nature of war and oppression.