Geoffrey Macnab

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.

At the age of nine, Ugandan Dominic Ongwen was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Years later, he is standing trial for war crimes in the Hague. “Many people see him as a victim, as a boy whose life was interrupted by this abduction. Some don’t understand this line that we [have] in the West, that once you become an adult, you suddenly stop being a victim,” co-director Lukasz Konopa tells Business Doc Europe.

This year’s CPH:DOX has 17 immersive projects on display, a record number. Casting his eye over the VR selection, CPH:LAB’s Head of Studies Mark Atkin notes an intriguing trend - the use of gaming tools. “I am really conscious that creativity precedes innovation. It is through the experiments of artists such as these that we learn what these tools are really good at. It is their pioneering efforts that willed what will become the metaverse,” he tells BDE.

You won’t find many documentaries that were conceived in more unlikely fashion than Lin Alluna’s Twice Colonized (opening CPH:DOX following its world premiere in Sundance). The director spotted Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist Aaju Peter by chance on the streets near the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. They’d never met before yet Peter was to become the subject of a film which would take seven years to complete.