Three years ago when I spoke to Tomasz Wasilewski about his sophomore feature Floating Skyscrapers, the Polish director teased a future project which would be a portrait of the lives of four women in the wake of the collapse of communism. That idea came to fruition as a story of lust, isolation and loneliness called United States of Love, and so Tomasz returns to the podcast to delve further into his rigorous approach to rehearsals and the new difficulty he found when it came to editing a story in which multiple interacting characters’ lives play out on screen sequentially but all share synchronous timelines.

Poland, 1990. The winds of change are blowing in Poland. The first euphoric year of freedom, but also of uncertainty for the future. Four apparently happy women of different ages decide it’s time to change their lives, fight for their happiness and fulfill their desires. Agata is a young mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage, who seeks refuge in another, impossible relationship. Renata is an older teacher fascinated with her neighbor Marzena – a lonely former local beauty queen, whose husband works in Germany. Marzena’s sister Iza is a headmistress in love with the father of one of her students.

It’s a film about four women but at the end it’s a film about one woman. That was very important for me to put one woman in the body of four.

Edoardo De Angelis’ thought provoking third feature Indivisible explores the lives of eighteen year old siamese twins, Daisy and Violet, as they are faced with the emotional decision of whether to be surgically separated. That daunting realisation of a previously unimagined future in which they could grow up independently inevitably leads the sisters to consider questions about identity and separation. I sat down with Edoardo at the London Film Festival to delve deeper into the emotional themes of the film and the methods of bringing those core contemplations to life.

Daisy and Viola are siamese twin sisters on the verge of turning 18, living in the suburbs of Naples. They are blessed with beautiful voices and thanks to their performances at weddings, communions and baptisms, they get the livelihood for the whole family. Kept isolated from the rest of the world by their own father, who just exploits them in order to make money, their life turns upside-down when one of them falls in love for the first time and they discover that they can be separated.

I wanted to make a movie about growing up, about separation, about the idea that you need to cut something of yourself if you really want to grow up.

Unfolding almost exclusively within the confines of a Brussels family home which has become a battleground for pent up resentments and socioeconomic accusations, Joachim Lafosse’s After Love begins 15 years after the happily ever after marriage of Marie and Boris, as the couple painfully move towards separation and divorce. I sat down with Joachim (my thanks to Juliet Dante for her excellent translation skills) during the London Film Festival to discover his methods for creating a family unit in slow disintegration and how the discovery of the Stab One gimbal, a lighter alternative to the steadicam system, enabled the production to fluidly capture the long sequence shots of domestic hostility the story required.

After 15 years of living together, Marie and Boris decide to get a divorce. Marie had bought the house in which they live with their two daughters, but it was Boris who had completely renovated it. Since he cannot afford to find another place to live, they must continue to share it. When all is said and done, neither of the two is willing to give up.

To live a love story, to be in love, one must always accept a certain amount of loss – we’re going to lose something as we love another person.

After Love is available in cinemas and to stream now at Curzon Artificial Eye.

Depicting the true accounts of inseparable brothers Elmer and Erik as they attempt to escape the wrath of their headmaster’s unrelenting tyranny, Jesper W Nielsen’s The Day Will Come brings us a painfully honest depiction of the boys’ lives in a 1960s Copenhagen orphanage. I was lucky enough to sit down with the sagacious Jesper at the London Film Festival, who spoke to me about translating the disturbing reality of institutional abuse into his harrowing new feature.

Inspired by true events and set in the blooming 1960s, The Day Will Come centers around two young brothers who are instantly robbed of their lives when they are placed in a boy’s home forgotten by time. Armed only with a vivid imagination and a fickle hope, the boys engage in the frightening battle against Headmaster Heck and his lethal tyranny.

I didn’t want to make a film about victims, I wanted to make a film about how people react under repression – the secret powers we have as human beings to survive these circumstances.

Whilst interviewing Director Alice Diop at this year’s London Film Festival I could feel passion emanating from her as she spoke of her new project On Call – a film which seeks to put names and faces to the asylum seekers suffering a life of loneliness and fear as they live in exile in Paris. Sneaking behind the curtain of their one on one consultations with doctors and psychiatrists who go far beyond the obligations of their roles, this documentary highlights those who attempt to help people find their footing in world where they have become purely a statistic.

The consulting service is located in the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. It’s an outpost at the end of a corridor. A large room where sick men show up, bearing physical scars, and whose pain seems closely linked to the suffering of exile. They keep coming back here because they still harbor hopes that this place will give them the means to stay afloat, to survive the turmoil of their lives hitting rock bottom.

It is political because it looks people in the eyes; this is a way to understand the violence and the difficulty the migrants have been through.

Creatively combining archival footage, firsthand accounts and rotoscoped animation, Keith Maitland’s feature documentary TOWER recreates the tense horror of America’s first mass school shooting – perpetrated in 1966 by a lone gunman from the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower over the course of 96 horrifying minutes. Directors Notes sat down with Keith at the London Film Festival to discover how he brought the tragic events of that day to visceral life for a new generation all too familiar with the spectre of senseless acts of public violence.

An animated and action-packed look at America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.

When in doubt, my goal was to focus on humanity over information and trust audiences to put the whole thing together.

At the beginning of this year I would have never imagined that one of my cinematic highlights would be an Icelandic feature about estranged sheep farmers, but Grimur Hakonarson’s Rams is a film filled with such deep humour and an even deeper humanity, that I was rapt from its opening frames. Grimur joins us on the podcast to share how he overcame challenges of funding, weather and sheep casting, to scoop the prestigious Un Certain Regard award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

In a remote Icelandic farming valley, two brothers who haven’t spoken in 40 years have to come together in order to save what’s dearest to them – their sheep.

I had to think about the spiritual quality of the sheep, and then the material quality of the sheep.

What if God was not only real but lived in Brussels with his wife and unknown daughter, spending his time exacting a series of petty and cruel torments on mankind? That’s the scenario which award winning Director Jaco Van Dormael mines to great comic and visual effect in his fourth feature The Brand New Testament. Jaco joined DN to discuss how he creates cinema in which perceptions of reality match our own non-linear thought processes, and why despite featuring gospels, disciples and God himself, The Brand New Testament isn’t a film about religion.

God exists! He lives in Brussels. He’s a real bastard, odious with his wife and daughter. We know a lot about his son, but very little about his daughter. Her name is Ea and she’s ten years old. One day, she revolts against her father, hacks his computer and leaks to the entire world their inevitable date of death by SMS…

I thought it was normal you know – you make a short film, you have an Academy Award, then you make another.