Geoffrey Macnab

After he read an article about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and its potential benefits, Swiss director Marcel Wyss decided to become his own guinea pig. “It said that psychedelics can help people deal with deep fears, including the fear of death,” Wyss confides to Business Doc Europe. “After more than twenty years of making documentaries, many people had trusted me with their personal stories. At some point I felt it was my turn to open up and share my own.”

In a society in which expectant young mothers now need to bring their own medicine and equipment to hospital, Caroline, the subject of Nolwenn Hervé’s feature debut The Cord, is part of a network that gives Venezuelan women a chance of a safe pregnancy. “I didn’t have a producer; I didn’t have resources to do it; I didn’t have money but I was sure I would make it,” director Hervé describes both the film’s humble beginnings and her determination to tell Caroline’s story.

As ever, CPH:DOX Industry Head Mara Gourd-Mercado will be overseeing a packed professional programme that includes FORUM, the INTER:ACTIVE Exhibition and CPH:CONFERENCE, and which welcomes the cream of international creative and business talent. What the festival has no say over, however, is the current turmoil across the globe, which means that arranging travel plans for international guests has been somewhat testing. “It is such a fast-moving situation. We don’t know what it is going to look like from one day to another,” Gourd-Mercado tells BDE.

Pieter-Jan De Pue’s dramatic new documentary Mariinka (sold by Films Boutique and opening CPH:DOX) is the culmination of a full decade of work and has evolved greatly over that period, with one of the featured Zolotko brothers fighting for Russia while another fights for Ukraine. What’s more, the Ukrainian city of Mariinka has been turned into “a land full of rubble…there is nothing that stands there,” De Pue laments to Business Doc Europe.

Witch Club Satan are a fast-emerging mega-force in the world of Norwegian “black metal” - and when they play, they make a very big din. In her new film Hex (sold by CAT&Docs), cinematographer-turned-director Maja Holand follows the band’s founders, Victoria, Nikoline, and Johann, as they try to gate crash a male-dominated world. “My approach was that I stayed with them, often slept in the same house - and they sometimes just called me the fourth witch!” the director tells BDE of the rapport she shared with the band.

Before she retired, Lisbeth Grägg confided to director Sylvelin Måkestad that when she retired, she planned to travel to Finland and retrieve a long-lost revolver with which her father, fighting for the Finnish army, unsuccessfully attempted suicide after a clash with the Russians during the Second World War. “That was inspiring to me, an elderly woman setting off on a secret mission like this. I thought this is something I can’t miss. I have to apply for money and do a film about it,” Måkestad tells BDE.

After her assault by Spanish police officers on the day of the unofficial referendum on Catalonian independence, activist Marta Torrecillas was subjected to a horrific barrage of insults on social media where she was accused of lying about her injuries. “I saw her video. I was very touched by her story because although it was her, it could have been me or any of the other women who had been in polling stations on that day, trying to vote,” director Anna M. Bofarull tells BDE before the world premiere of her new feature doc Rebel.

In 2009 director Jukka Kärkkäinen made The Living Room of a Nation which introduced us to Finnish Tero Pihkakoski and his newborn son, Henri. Sixteen years on, Kärkkäinen revisits the pair to record their ongoing journey. “I think he is some kind of mirror image of me,” the director notes philosophically of his friend Tero. “We are getting more and more sad every year…maybe life is just difficult for people like us. When we are happy, we are really happy. When we are sad, we are really, really sad.”

For her feature doc selected for Thessaloniki Doc Fest, Guro Saniola Bjerk takes us to Båtsfjord, an Arctic fishing village where cod is more important than God. Even in one of the coldest places on Earth, you can find the warmest and funniest people there, whether Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Syrian, Tamil…even Russian. “If you are a good worker, they don’t care where you are from,” Bjerk talks of the town’s tolerance toward foreign workers and immigrants.

Producer Jessica Hargrave talks to Business Doc Europe about her highly emotional documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, directed by Ryan White, about the witty, warm and fast-talking word-poet Andrea Gibson, who is facing a terminal cancer diagnosis. “I have never been in a situation like this before when I know almost certainly that I was going to lose someone as I walked toward them,” Hargrave reflects. “It’s a very unusual experience…it helped us recognise the urgency of life.”