Geoffrey Macnab

Joe is the main protagonist of The Flats, living in a near derelict count estate in north Belfast. He’s a craggy, weather-beaten figure with a bony face full of grief. There is very little laughter in Joe’s life. He grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Nearly 50 years on, he is still painstakingly re-living those traumatic days. Bitter memories have distorted his life. “The face carries the scars…I think his face says so much,” director Alessandra Celesia tells BDE of her subject.

Shot over four years, The Black Garden tells the story of three generations living in the shadow of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, where war has become part of everyday life. “They've never known anything else. Their grandparents experienced war, their parents, and now it's the younger generations. They're unfortunately prepared for it, but they have an unshakeable determination,” director Pazoumian says of his subjects.

Yance Ford’s new feature doc Power (which screened at CPH:DOX and is soon to launch on Netflix) looks at the origins of police power in the US and asks why American citizens have allowed cops to hold so much sway over their lives. The film features interviews with many leading academics who detail with chilling clarity the reasons behind 200 years of American police bias and brutality. This, as Ford puts it to Business Doc Europe, is a system with “violence, coercion and control’ at its core.

Norwegian docmaker Benjamin Ree talks to BDE about his double-Sundance winning Ibelin, which screens at CPH ahead of its launch on Netflix. The film, about a young man and his secret gaming life that is only discovered after his untimely death, has been wowing both young and older audiences alike back in Norway. “A lot of them [the older generation] go to the cinema because they want to understand their children or their grandchildren,” says Ree.

The prolific and versatile Alina Simone has been working as a journalist and radio reporter for many years. She is also an essayist, author and singer-songwriter - and now she has turned feature filmmaker too. Her documentary Black Snow, about a Siberian mother-of-three who finds herself under the aggressive scrutiny of the Russian authorities when she steps up as a citizen journalist, world-premiered this week at CPH:DOX. Simone talks to BDE.

50 years on from that momentous night in April 1974 in Brighton, England, when the unsung Swedes won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, British filmmaker James Rogan is telling the story of one of the greatest pop bands in history with a depth and insight that transcends cheap nostalgia. “I love to make films about outsiders and I think that ABBA were the ultimate pop outsiders,” he tells BDE of his new feature doc, ABBA - Against the Odds.

“This is the place to be,” First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel enthuses about CPH:DOX. “There is something about having another IDFA in the spring…all in all, I really feel this place is taking care of film as an art but also as a marketplace.” Nonetheless, the First Hand Films boss sees continuing stresses in the doc sector even as memories of the pandemic recede into the distance.

Gröndahl’s feature documentary follows Finnish birth experts – midwife Kirsi and doula Anna-Riitta - who want to put an end to “obstetric violence” and enable people to give birth on their own terms. “I believe that if this was something people with testicles would experience, not with wombs, there would be more resources put into this, but it’s [seen as] a woman’s issue and so is [considered] not so important,” the director muses on the gender politics behind birth.

Sometimes docmakers struggle very hard to find their subjects. In the case of Lie To Me (international premiere March 18), the subject (Bjørn Bjercke, Bitcoin expert and whistleblower) came direct to the filmmakers, at which point they were immediately pulled into the “rabbit hole” of OneCoin, the fraudulent cryptocurrency presided over by the glamorous Bulgarian-born German swindler Ruja Ignatova, soon to be become one of the FBI’s “most wanted” felons…

In Connie Field’s feature documentary, which world-premieres at CPH:DOX, three Hungarian women fight to expose the dismantling of democracy in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. The director believes that her story can have strong resonance for US audiences. “Who I made it for was people like me, to scare them to death, so that in my country specifically, we will work like mad to make sure that Trump doesn’t get into the White House,” she tells BDE.