Sheffield 22

Five female Nepali filmmakers are attending DocFest looking for financial partners on their projects, as well as to investigate networking opportunities. They are in Sheffield as part of the #Docs Connect Taskovski training program supported by British Council’s Gender Film Programme. “This collaboration with the British Council Nepal is a further step towards building a stronger documentary filmmaking base in Nepal,” comments Taskovski Films founder, Irena Taskovski.

The new doc A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, directed by Mark Cousins and produced by Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, is one of the most high profile projects presented at this week’s MeetMarket at Sheffield DocFest. “When you look inside her imagination, you encounter this kind of Leonardo Da Vinci untrammeled thing where science and art, left and right, all combine,” Cousins tells BDE of his subject, the late Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

BDE talks to producer Lorine Plagnol who will be in Sheffield this week taking part in MeetMarket with her company Sungazer’s latest project Dalton’s Dream. This is a feature doc about UK X Factor winner Dalton Harris. As a young, queer musical star from Jamaica, he is seeking love and acceptance in a world that isn’t always sympathetic toward him. The film, currently in post-production, is co-directed by Kim Longinotto and Franky Murray Brown.

This warm-hearted doc feels at times more like a classic tear-jerker with the seemingly mismatched pairing of an elderly Barcelona drag-queen and a wide-eyed young girl learning to appreciate each other. But in this film truth is more engaging than fiction as nonagenarian Gilda Love dramatically changes when he is asked to take care of an abandoned three-year-old.

When two Brazilian filmmakers in separate continents - one in Sao Paulo, the other in LA - decide to eschew messaging and social media, instead creating a manifesto of video-letter correspondence, the resulting film is an engaging delve into the lives of two intelligent and creative women as they reflect on art, politics, emotions and friendship.

It is a tough call to make a gripping documentary centred around economics, but it is to Chilean Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano’s credit that their central characters are intriguingly complex, presented against a backdrop of the country’s popular revolts of 2019. The film world premieres in Rebellion Strand.

Palestinian political figure Marwan Barghouti, often described as the ‘Palestinian Nelson Mandela’, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison following what was seen by many as his unlawful arrest and imprisonment. Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott’s film may well be straightforward in tone and structure, but this takes nothing from the strength of this provocative and compassionate story.

Very much the perfect fit for public audiences at the Sheffield DocFest, the engagingly enthusiastic Studio Electrophonique tells the strange and rather wonderful story of an amateur music engineer who built a sound studio in his own modest house, ending up working with a series of now-iconic local bands during the 1980s and 90s and helping them onto the road to success.

For many people bodybuilders are freaks, but to Hungarian director Anna Nemes they are beautiful living sculptures. In Beauty of the Beast, world-premiering at Sheffield DocFest, she accords to female bodybuilders the same seriousness as another director would to contemporary dancers, using every part of her filmmaking process to underline their inherent majesty and dignity. The director discusses her work with Business Doc Europe.

Monday 27 June sees the world premiere “cine-concert” of Esther Johnson’s bold and innovative new feature documentary Dust & Metal at Sheffield DocFest 2022. It’s a Vietnam story but don’t expect any of the clichés of apocalyptic western war movies set in the country. The focus here is on bikes, not guns. Johnson gets in tandem with Business Doc Europe.