DocsBarcelona 24

UK viewers are likely to be deeply shocked by Our Land, Our Freedom, which competes in Main Competition at DocsBarcelona. It reveals the brutality with which British colonial soldiers treated freedom fighters during the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. “We are only scratching the surface with this film. We would have loved to have gone much deeper…maybe if Netflix offers us a 10-part series, we will!” says co-director Meena Nanji.

In The Witness, Spanish filmmaker Pere Salom tells the story of Eduardo Palmer, a prolific filmmaker who documented the rise to power of Fidel Castro in Cuba in the 1950s, but who also took part in the counter-revolution against the regime, eventually settling in exile in the US. “Palmer is, on the one hand, an important and respected producer in many Latin American countries. But on the other hand, he is completely unknown to most people. I want that to change,” Salom tells BDE.

The Emmy-nominated North American filmmaker will reveal the secrets behind his “unique, captivating vision” and his HBO-backed show How To With John Wilson. "It is a pleasure to welcome to Barcelona one of the documentary directors with a more humane and empathetic approach to the mundane, with such a capacity to appreciate the details of life and to relish what we can only see when we actively look”, says Èric Motjer, Head of DocsBarcelona Industry, which runs May 6-10.

Do you remember when tech start-ups would find you a place for the night, or locate a taxi just a minute away, or deliver you a burger? Just to make the business of living that little bit easier. Well, now start-ups are dealing in death, enabling grieving folk to communicate with AI-generated versions of their deceased loved ones, via web chat or VR. “[People] don't believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can't deal with the fact that death is finite,” co-director Moritz Riesewieck tells BDE. “And these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”

Paris-based French-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem talks to BDE about her film that documents four generations of women in her family, one of whom is the internationally renowned actress Hiam Abbass, the director’s mother. “It's as if the women of my family…each represent a piece of history, a piece of time that doesn't exist anymore,” says Soualem, whose film screens May 10 in DocsBarcelona’s Docs&Love sidebar.

The documentary, directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó and which premiered at Sundance 2024, examines the Gross National Happiness index in Bhutan as well as the personal happiness of one of the people measuring it. Sales on Agent of Happiness are handled by Cinephil. DocsBarcelona runs May 2 to 12. DocsBarcelona Industry will run May 6 to 10.

“The geographical position of Barcelona makes us a connection point between Latin America, Europe, and the Mediterranean,” new Industry Head Èric Motjer tells BDE of the DocsBarcelona Industry programme (May 6-10), whose success is in finding “a balance between a selection of creatively challenging projects with co-production potential, and ensuring that the market is, at the same time, a space for analyzing and debating the future ahead.”

The maverick, madcap director of the eponymous ‘How to…’ series for HBO Max shared his working methods and creative processes with the audience of Docs Barcelona Industry this week. “The closest thing I can relate it to is when you're at a bar and someone's just talking at you for an hour,” he said of his interview technique. “That's the kind of vibe that I try to recreate in the work, where I like to find someone that can just talk without interruption and just doesn't care what I think, which is, I feel, how most conversations historically for me go.”

The professional market of the 27th DocsBarcelona International Documentary Film Festival will run May 6-10. Projects are selected across the Public Pitch, Speed Meetings, Rough Cut and New Tech Pitch sections and participants within each section will present to a panel of international decision makers, funders and distributors. The DocsBarcelona festival runs May 2-12.

My Sextortion Diary may only be just over an hour in length, but it is a powerful and provocative real-life story, prescient in reflecting the unhappy reality facing those people who are forced to deal with the awful behaviour of unscrupulous hackers, and handled in moving matter-of-fact style by Spanish filmmaker Patricia Franquesa as she recounts the terrible ordeal she had to suffer.