Geoffrey Macnab

British filmmaker Ben Rivers and French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson are yet to meet in person - but audiences at CPH:DOX last week enjoyed an unusual collaboration between the duo. Atkinson provided new voice-over and musical accompaniments for two of Rivers’ films, Urth (2016) and Look Then Below (2019). The soundtracks were performed ‘live.’ Rivers was too busy with other work to travel to Copenhagen but he made time to speak to Business Doc Europe.

When she was preparing her documentary Fire Of Love (an international premiere in DOX:AWARD and Visions du Réel opening film), Sara Dosa took inspiration from François Truffaut’s New Wave classic Jules et Jim, she tells BDE. Her film is also about a love triangle, the passion French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft felt for each other - and their romantic obsession with volcanoes themselves.

In Sportscast 2, a Swedish football match offers director Sara Sjölin the perfect vehicle to commentate on the demise of her break-up with her boyfriend. The two teams were arch and bitter rivals. This, therefore, seemed the perfect match through which she could explore her relationship with him, she tells Business Doc Europe.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a towering figure in contemporary music. A genius, but one with a headstrong and flawed personality. As well as telling the story of 2019 staging of his magnum opus Licht, Dutch director Oeke Hoegendijk also offers an intimate and revealing portrait of Stockhausen himself, from the point of view of his wives, former lovers, children and collaborators. She explains more to BDE.

In Emilie Beck’s debut feature doc, screening in Nordic:Dox, a young woman, Priyangika, who was adopted at a young age, embarks on an existential odyssey to her birth country of Sri Lanka to discover her own story. “I knew that whatever she [Priyangika] found during the journey, I wanted to follow her emotions, her existential travel...[but] the further we went, the bigger the story got,” director Beck tells BDE.

TV dramas have long perpetuated the stereotype of Naples as a Mecca for gangsters. In her Dox:Award Competition film, director Victoria Fiore wanted to show another side of the city, and so follows the Neopolitan kids, especially the lovable but mischievous Entoni. “Entoni’s story just shone through,” the director tells BDE. “I fell in love with his energy. He had so much of it. We got along straight away.”

If future generations want to know how the world’s scientific community responded to coronavirus, one of their first starting points is likely to be US director David France’s How To Survive A Pandemic, sold by Dogwoof. The film, screening in CPH: Science, tells the story of how scientists across the world raced to develop vaccines against a virus which has been killing millions. France explains his doc to BDE.

Finnish/UK filmmaker John Webster talks to Business Doc Europe about his film that exposes how corporate jargon, fashionable management practice and ‘self-serving bureaucracy masquerading as efficiency’ threaten to drain all sense of satisfaction from the work process. “If people have burn-out, it is not because of weakness and personal flaws but because they’ve just been subjected to a toxic working environment,” he says.

This isn’t the first time that Danish filmmaker Mistrati has explored the dirty secrets of the chocolate industry. His previous films include The Dark Side Of Chocolate (2010) and Shady Chocolate (2012). “The price for a chocolate bar is unnaturally low. It doesn’t make any sense. A chocolate bar should cost around 4 or 5 quid, not 50p. It’s unrealistic…unless you don’t pay the farmer and the farmer’s employees,” the director tells BDE of his F:act Award Comp selection.

CPH:DOX returns to cinemas April 23 after two online editions, opening with Into The Ice, a timely reminder of the dangers of the West’s continuing dependence on fossil fuels. “Now it seems that we finally understand that energy politics is security politics and that therefore we have to act fast…and this film shows we need to act even faster than we thought to save the climate,” says the festival’s Niklas Engstrøm.