Cannes 2022

At the close of Cannes Docs (and after the CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator project Twice Colonized by Lin Alluna picked up the IEFTA Award, €10,000), CIRCLE founder Biljana Tutorov spoke to BDE about the importance of the Cannes collaboration. She also updated BDE on the Montenegrin project The Last Nomads, which she is co-directing Petar Glomazić, and which picked up the €20,000 Eurimages co-production prize at CPH:DOX.

The directors talk to BDE about their documentary that deals in very graphic detail with aspects of the human body doc and for which they were granted free access to the hospitals of northern Paris, establishing a rapport with the doctors. “Every time, they go smoke a cigarette, we were with them…we followed them to the operating rooms everywhere. When you have access, you have access.”

The morning after the world-premiere of Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgen answered questions posed by Mandy Chang (Global Head of Documentaries at Fremantle) before an audience of doc professionals. “I was definitely interested in creating a non-biographical experience,” he said. “With Bowie, it was perfectly suited for that, because David Bowie is all about projection.”

In The Super 8 Years, one of two documentaries screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, celebrated French author Annie Ernaux and her son David revisit their family’s home movies, reinterpreting them, with melancholy hindsight but also a sense both of emotional and historical detachment, as a sign of their times.

The Docs-in-Progress awards were handed out at May 24 at the end of the market’s headline Doc Day. Top cash awards went to the CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator Showcase Twice Colonized directed by Lin Alluna (IEFTA Award, €10,000), while Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias (won the Al Jazeera Documentary Award, which entails a co-production deal with a minimum contribution of $15,000. All awards.

For his directorial debut, Ethan Coen offers up a vibrant and often exhilarating look at the turbulent life of a true rock’n’roll legend, dealing with the demons that drove Jerry Lee Lewis. To an extent this is a non-judgmental film that is as much about his determined resilience as it is the scandals that haunted his life, but it is also tight and lean, brimming with mesmerising footage and illuminating interviews.

Doc Alliance, a network of seven of the most influential European documentary film festivals, announced May 24 the winners of its 15th annual Doc Alliance Awards during Doc Day of the Festival de Cannes. Best Feature went to A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia and In the Billowing Night won Best Short. Nataša Urban’s The Eclipse received a Special Mention.

The multi-layered documentary takes you on a journey through the minds and worlds of three like-minded and intrinsically connected thinkers and artists. Filmmaker Jose Luis Lopez Linares had the good fortune to film French writer Jean-Claude Carrière a year before his untimely death as he retraces Goya’s footsteps, all the time expounding lyrically on art, history, humanity and love.

Sundance-winning director Shaunak Sen discusses his remarkable vine documentary, selected for Cannes Special Screening section. It’s a film not only about the majestic black kite, whose numbers darken the sky above Delhi, it’s also a film about kinship, about shifts in our ecology and about devotion to a cause. And it’s a fascinating portrait of a city.

The prolific and internationally acclaimed Dutch filmmaker passed away in Amsterdam May 21 at the age of 70 after a long battle with MS and cancer.