Venice 23

Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of The Outpost world-premiering in Venice, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel, a visionary who would attempt to put on a Pink Floyd concert in the Amazon rain forest so as to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. “We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era’ idealists” director Morabito tells BDE of his subject.

Queer feminist filmmaker Julia Fuhr Mann freely admits that she loves sports. She watches football and athletics. What infuriates her, though, is the gender stereotyping in the TV sports coverage and the patronising attitude toward queer, trans and intersex athletes. The director discusses her debut feature doc with Business Doc Europe.

Paris-based French-Palestinian filmmaker Lina Soualem talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film that documents the lives of women across four generations within 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.

Hollywoodgate, which follows the Taliban for a year after America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, often feels like a first rough cut, withholding almost all contextualisation of the material. But the film, with unprecedented access to some of the Taliban’s leadership and their chilling discussions of violence and the oppression of women, nevertheless makes for essential viewing.

The legendary Hollywood filmmaker is profiled in the new documentary by UK docmaker Matthew Wells, who has previously profiled other such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick. “I was really…interested in the symbolism of Frank Capra’s rags to riches story, what it came to mean and how that resonates with his movies,” Wells tells BDE of his contradictory subject.

Almost 50 years ago, the Oscar-winning French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau turned up at Panama’s San Blas islands intending to make a film about the Kuna community there. But the film was never shown, and more or less forgotten about until, quite by accident, Swiss-Panamanian director Andrés Peyrot heard of its existence and determined not only to track it down but to finally screen it to the Kuna folk half a century later.

The Chilean/German Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert plays in Competition while Andres Peyrot’s God Is a Woman (France, Switzerland, Panama) will open the section. The Italian doc Passione critica by Simone Isola, Franco Montini, Patrizia Pistagnesi gets a Special Screening. Venice Critics Week runs 30 August to September 9. Malqueridas will compete for the Grand Prize of €5000 and the Audience Prize (€3000).