Geoffrey Macnab

Greta Stocklassa’s feature doc, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, profiles Hans Blix, the Swedish politician who was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the man charged with the responsibility of determining whether or not Saddam Hussein was harbouring WMDs post-9/11. The director discusses Blix with BDE.

The Netflix doc follows the painstaking investigations of Rae de Leon into the disturbing number of cases of young women across the US who report sexual assault to the police, only to end up being charged themselves. “Rae absolutely doesn’t give up. She is totally pragmatic, she is polite always…and she is just so persistent,” Schwartzman tells BDE of the “self-effacing and humble” journalist.

Fredrik Gertten’s new film, a world premiere in CPH:DOX F:act Award section, takes on corrupt fraudsters and kleptocrats around the world. “The idea [behind the film] was that all frustrations and all uprisings, good or bad, around the planet, have the same source, the same anger,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.

Sharon-Rose Khumalo is a South African beauty queen, born and raised as a girl, who discovered that she has the genetic make-up of a male. Dimakatso Sebidi, meanwhile, is a male-presenting intersex activist. These two extraordinary characters, attractive, charismatic and funny, are the protagonists of the debut feature doc from Romanian-born Tünde Skovrán, who talks to BDE.

The story of top Finnish egamer Verneri “Bona” Junkala story is told in The Gamer, the new documentary from Finnish directors Petri Luukkainen and Jesse Jokinen. Bona has astonishing hand-eye coordination and hunger for battle. His flaw, though, is that he gets very nervous during important team tournaments, he always seems to blow it. The directors explain their feature doc to BDE.

The title refers to a top-secret UK government surveillance programme that allows the authorities to download mobile phone data from suspects stopped at UK ports. When human rights activist Muhammad Rabbani refused to hand over the passwords to his devices he was threatened with imprisonment. “Even though I started with Rabbani’s story…I wanted to make a film looking at this broader landscape around questions of digital privacy,” the director tells BDE.

In Labor, after Hanna leaves her family and girlfriend for the city of her dreams, San Francisco, a door into a new world is opened up for her, and together with dominatrix Chloe and trans Cyd she begins a journey which takes her further and further away from her life at home in Sweden. “It’s about a lot of other things,” director Tove Pils tells BDE of her film, “like longing for being part of a community and exploring your sexuality.”

Norwegian director Tonje Hessen Schei dives deep into the world of US fundamentalism in her disturbing new documentary Praying For Armageddon (co-directed with Michael Rowley and a world premiere at CPH:DOX). “It’s really shocking when you see how engrained religion is in the military industrial complex as well as warfare,” Hessen Schei tells BDE.

The film follows Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig as he travels across the former Soviet Republics…taking pictures of bus stops. “On a deeper level, a feeling of resistance and poetry is what attracted me and kept me going,” Hegnsvad, also a full-time news editor, tells Business Doc Europe of what drew him to make the documentary.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.