Interviews

Renowned Scottish Oscar-winning actor and artist Tilda Swinton is co-director of The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze, a playful, experimental documentary produced by the Derek Jarman Lab and that looks at learning from every angle. The film, also co-directed by Bartek Dziadosz, screens in the International Competition at Sheffield Doc Fest. As Dziadosz tells BDE, they decided to make a film that would “interrogate” the very idea of education.

Dutch director Suzanne Raes discusses her new feature doc about the members of an eccentric, brilliant and sometimes dysfunctional English upper-class family coming to terms with their childhood as they prepare to pack up and leave their ancient, expansive, sprawling home in Oxfordshire. “Of course, the film is not about dragons, but about what the dragon represents; it is about the stories we create around things that frighten us,” says Raes. (Plus trailer)

“All the time I was making this, I was amazed by how resilient the people are in Kyiv and determined not to let the Russians win…This is their war. It’s not America’s war, it’s not NATO’s war. They want to win it because they feel this incredible burning sense of injustice,” Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald says of the indomitable mentality of the Ukrainians, as exemplified by the city’s mayor and former boxing world champion Vitali Klitschko.

The Whickers, founded in 2015 and named after the legendary British broadcaster and documentarian Alan Whicker, this year celebrates 10 years of collaboration with Sheffield DocFest. On June 16 the annual £100,000 Film and TV Funding Award will be handed out, as well as a £20,000 development prize. June 15 sees The Whickers and Sheffield DocFest Podcast Awards, valued at £5000 and £2000 respectively. Consultant Art Director Jane Ray explains her organisation’s rationale and modus operandi to BDE.

Back in the 1980s Genesis P-Orridge was described as “too shocking, even for punks,” this coming on the back of his sexually graphic performances at London’s ICA in 1976 together with his equally notorious then-girlfriend Cosey Fanni Tutti. But David Charles Rodrigues’ new doc reveals another side to Genesis. Yes, he was formidable and dangerous, but he was also a genuine intellectual and a philosopher years ahead of his time, as well as a loving dad. “You can live for your art and be this extreme artist and musician and thinker, but also part of your extremeness is living with unconditional love for your family,” the director tells BDE.

Ukrainian Anna Kurkurina is many things, a queer world champion powerlifter, a social media influencer with 350,000 followers and a protector of thousands of animals which are also the victims of the war in Ukraine. Her kindness also extends to fellow Ukrainians such as filmmakers Tetiana Dorodnitsyna and Andrii Lytvynenko ever since they met in 2019. “Every time we came to ‘Mama’s home’ she would feed us, she would take care of us,” Dorodnitsyna remembers. “From those five years grew up a friendship.”

Even in advance of its world premiere in Sheffield, Croatian director Goran Devic’s Pavilion No 6 (sold by Film Harbour) is already being billed as a Covid movie with a difference - a feelgood affair about a feelbad subject that approaches the pandemic in a humorous and surreal way. “I felt that every single individual I met [at the Covid vaccination centre] was happy to communicate. Even the shooting was some kind of communication,” Devic tells BDE.

In her debut feature doc, which she started shooting in 2021, Adelina Borets tells the allegorical tale of Natalia who is fighting to protect her small plot of land in Kyiv as developers send in the bulldozers and tractors…and then Russia mounts a full-scale invasion of her country. “I'm reflecting on my hero in the way of my life goal,” says Borets, who lost her home in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “Because I also have a dream to come back to my land, to my house.”

What started off as a hastily arranged assignment at film school developed into a 10-year study of a fractured life which mirrored that of the director herself. “Through Alice's story I started to realise a lot of my personal issues,” feature doc debutant Isabela von Tent tells Business Doc Europe of her film world-premiering May 29 at Krakow FF. “During her growth and development, I developed myself as I was observing her.”

Poland, December 1981, the period of martial law. Soldiers are on the streets. Everything from eggs to shoes to soap is in short supply. Solidarity union leader Lech Walesa is being demonised by the Communist leaders as an enemy of the state. This is the period that Tomasz Wolski examines in his new archive-based documentary, A Year in the Life of the Country, a world premiere at the Krakow Film Festival on 30 May.