Cannes 2022

Brussels-based producer Maarten Schmidt comes to European Film Promotion’s showcase for leading producers with four projects, two of which (The Last Frontier and Under the Surface) are feature docs, another of which (Exit Tales) is a 6 x 12-minute animated series based on the voice-recorded interviews of six child refugees. Schmidt talks the magic of documentary with Business Doc Europe.

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.

Hot Docs award-winning producer Johannes Schubert (Austria) outlines to BDE his plans for the 2022 EFP programme and explains his fascination both for the doc form and its practitioners. "Documentary filmmakers are incredibly kind and open-minded people. They are ambassadors for a better world and are courageous. I am longing for collaboration with them, and together we always try to challenge the status quo."

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.”

The May 21 Scandinavian Showcase is one of eight country/regional presentations of soon to be finalised docs-in-progress, presented at Cannes Docs. The showcases are primarily designed for decision makers looking for new titles, in particular festival programmers and sales agents. In some cases the projects are also looking for post-production funding or general gap financing, and some are still open to co-production opportunities.

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.”

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

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.

Chiledoc Director Paula Ossandón and Chief Executive Diego Pino outlined the Chilean offer at the Cannes festival and market in 2022 ahead of the May 23 Chilean Showcase. “Chile has a tradition of documentary but in the last 10 years we have had an internationalisation of Chilean films. We created Chiledoc thinking about how to support new filmmakers and [to help] experienced filmmakers be present in these kind of festivals,” says Pino.

Tel Aviv-based Cinephil has been making waves in the Marché this week with a slate of new docs, among them Julie Bertuccelli’s feature Jane Campion: The Cinema Woman, which has been screening in Cannes Classics. The archive-based doc looks at the life and career of Campion, the director of Power Of The Dog and The Piano. Cinephil MD Olivier Tournaud tells BDE about the Campion doc and his entire Cannes slate.