SFFILM Doc Stories Festival Celebrates 11th Year, Impacts Oscar Race

“I think for all of our events, for Jesse and I, we feel very strongly that it needs to feel warm and inviting. Nothing should feel intimidating. It doesn’t mean that the work is not challenging, but that the environment that audiences are coming into, the environment that filmmakers are coming into, that it should feel like it’s for them. It should feel like a space that feels open to conversation and openness also to anxiety and fear, which is like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do with this movie.’”

“It’s something that has built a really lovely reputation. The industry that is based here, the documentary filmmakers, the documentary industry, they will show up. They want to show up for their fellow filmmakers… We often get asked [by filmmakers], ‘When is it? I need to hold it in my calendar,’ in such a lovely way. It’s the best kind of feeling to have.”

“I really love the fact that this festival does not counterprogram. We’re very lucky that every single one of the feature filmmakers is here with us on the ground. Every single one. And all of the shorts films have representation of some sort, whether it’s the director or the producer or the financier, and they get to go see one another’s work. And that’s such a wonderful moment for them because a lot of them are in the middle of debuting their film and rushing from festival to festival. The documentary community is small, and it is tight knit. And so, to be able to sit in a theater and appreciate one another’s craft is something that people really look forward to at Doc Stories.”

“One of the original ideas behind creating Doc Stories was about the opportunity to do something in the fall when there could be a showcase provided to documentary films at a time when they are really trying to garner attention, but also the opportunity that we have to provide platforms to titles that don’t have distribution, that are perhaps not as well known, that don’t have an engine of a major distributor behind them. And so, we really love the opportunity to do that.”

“The response of the audience is amazing because it is a real experience and very impacting. When you meet Fatma through the film, you make a friend. That’s what I hear. That’s what people tell me.”

“This bonding [through video calls], which shaped very quickly and very deeply, all made it so at the same time beautiful and also hard because I worry for her. And when the film was finished and it was selected for Cannes, I thought, ‘Okay, we made it.’ And I tell her and she says, ‘Yes, I’m coming. And I asked for the visa, everything.’ I mean it’s like it happens one after another. And literally the news of the selection [for Cannes], I got it the day I was pitching the film in Nyon at Visions du Reél in Switzerland, and they called me from Cannes. They say, ‘We’ve selected your film.’ And then I tell Fatma all of that, and then she gets killed the day after. She’s targeted by the Israeli army.”

“Once Nikola captured this stork and he made a decision to take care of it in front of our eyes, it started unraveling something that was just shocking and pure magic and something none of us has seen or witnessed before. How would this wild animal, this wild bird, react to the circumstances and to this man? And it naturally took us to another year of shooting and to the third act of the film that led us to a hopeful ending of the film because we witnessed in real life, in real time the story of a man saving a stork and a stork saving a man.”