Mark Cousins will deliver an “anti-masterclass” at Mdag Industry, the industry strand of Polish fest Millennium Docs Against Gravity. He’ll also lead a retrospective of his work.

“As filmmakers, our job is always to surprise and excite. We need to play with the form. Film festivals should play with their form, too. Many of them have masterclasses, so I’ll do an anti-masterclass, to plant a bomb under the idea of what a master is, and what a class is,” he tells Variety.

“In Finland, I was asked to do a 90-minute masterclass. I thought: ‘You can cook something in 90 minutes.’ We put an oven on stage and cooked as we talked about cinema. In Cannes, I said to the host: ‘Choose images, don’t tell me what they are, show them to me on the day and we’ll talk about them.’ The idea was to be vulnerable,...