“As you know, Danish documentary makers tend to travel out into the world. They were challenged by the whole situation,” Cecilia Lidin, doc consultant at the Danish Film Institute, observes of how the local doc community reacted earlier this year when, thanks to the Corona lockdown, their wings were suddenly clipped.
The Danish doc-makers may like to travel but they’re also resilient. They tend to know how “to find a way,” as Lidin puts it.
One Danish director she cites, Frederik Sølberg, was planning to make a film in South Korea. “Because the filmmaker himself could not travel, he needed to establish a closer relationship with both his protagonist and his producer [in Korea].”
The project in question was Hana Korea, about a young North Korean refugee trying to adjust to a new life in the south. The project was pitched at CPH:DOX, winning the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award. Lidin describes it as a film which “might even have (been) strengthened” by the restraints imposed by Covid.
As always, the Danish are preparing some highly original new documentary fare. One title supported by the DFI already sparking huge curiosity is the new AI project About A Hero, directed by Piotr Winiewicz and produced by Mads Damsbo through production company Makropol. “Basically, it’s a film about trying to make an algorithm about what a Werner Herzog film looks like,” Lidin explains. Herzog is collaborating on the mind-bending project which Lidin describes as “wonderful, quirky and very philosophical.”
During the summer months, the Fund has continued to give development funding to new documentary projects – as long as those filmmakers could “show a ‘corona’ plan as to how they would be able to work during these months with the money they were given.”
Lidin and her colleagues are still figuring out just how badly the documentary makers were affected and what assistance they might need in the long term. Documentary teams are not that big. Once the lockdown lifted, the filmmakers were quickly able to get back out into the world. Unlike their brethren working in fiction, they hadn’t needed to close down their sets. They were “able to wait out, basically, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have financial issues.”
There has also been a re-assessment of priorities. “Maybe the Corona crisis has shown us a new and important way of working. We discussed that a lot in Denmark. One thing is Corona. The other is climate. We have to deal with the fact that maybe the future does not lie with us travelling the world, filming and then going home,” Lidin reflects.
CPH:DOX, the country’s main festival for documentary, took place in March, just as the lockdown was beginning. “It was perceived as being a very great success. Everybody was so happy that it was possible and that they [the festival organisers] in a very short time turned it around.”
One obvious upside was that holding the event virtually allowed far more people to participate than would have been able to travel to Copenhagen.
“The same thing applied to Nordic Panorama,” Lidin comments of the September industry event. “They became a real Nordic festival, meaning that it was not just a physical festival in Malmö Sweden, but all the Nordic countries sat in.”
Now, as always, IDFA marks the last big documentary meeting of the year.
“It’s not a secret that once Orwa became director, he very clearly stated he wanted to look at other territories and maybe a more diverse festival. The Danes were thinking ‘maybe our moment has passed,’” Lidin observes of Nyrabia’s reign which started with the 2018 edition. “Maybe what is happening now in a good way is that you see we are spreading out a bit more. The Danish films go to different festivals. I’ve no critique of what Orwa is doing. He is doing absolutely the right thing…what’s happening from our point of view is maybe looking at other places. It’s the reality of the time and I think it makes total sense.”
Even so, Danish titles are
scattered across IDFA’s different sections. Among the new projects in Forum this week were Apollonia, Apollonia by Lea Glob, Anders S. Jepsen’s Of Boys and Men, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters and Talal Derki’s Song of Summer and Winter. Meanwhile, Marianne Hougen-Moraga and Estephan Wagner’s Songs of Repression and Sine Skibsholt’s Long, Live, Love are both screening in Best of Fests.
