Geoffrey Macnab

Dutch filmmaker Kasper Verkaik’s new film tells the story of US journalist Alec Shimkin who went missing in action in Vietnam just as he was threatening to lift the lid on the US Operation Speedy Express atrocity of 1968/69, which had an estimated body count of over 30,000, many thousands of them unarmed Vietnamese civilians. In researching Shimkin, Verkaik realised “there was so much more to find out about the Speedy Express story,” and that the journalist’s scoop “was way bigger” than even the journalist himself had known.

Movies That Matter, the Hague-based festival for works exploring human rights and social issues, opens March 20 with American Doctor by Poh Si Teng, which world-premiered at Sundance. MTM has its share of world premieres, but Artistic Director Margje de Koning is less worried about having films first than other festivals. “For Movies That Matter, it’s nice to have premieres but it’s not our main requirement. Our philosophy is very much about the impact of the film.”

When thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters were washed up on beaches in the North East of England, director Jeanie Finlay quickly realised she had stumbled on an extraordinary but very grim story about the wanton destruction of marine life and the knock-on effect on fishing communities. Her new documentary, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, investigates the event. What’s more, it will be released by Glimmerama, the recently announced distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the production company owned by Finlay, who explains more to BDE.

Tom Adjibi’s slyly subversive debut feature This Is Not A French Film [screening this week in NEXT:WAVE competition at CPH:DOX] exposes the bias and racism that non-white actors and artists still continually face in their careers. The director plays a version of himself - Tom, an actor so exasperated at being typecast that he decides to make a movie about it. “I have convictions, I have anger but sometimes my character is a little bit lost,” he describes to BDE the version of Tom we see in the movie.

Matter Of Britain is a full-scale Arthurian epic - but one made in a tiny Sussex village. Peter Treherne’s film (which has just screened at CPH:DOX following its world premiere at MOMA in New York) features present-day residents of Mayfield playing characters from Thomas Malory’s 15th century classic Le Morte d’Arthur. “The idea is that if you get everybody to come together in a performative activity, people aren’t being objectified or observed in their intimate everyday,” the director tells BDE. “To some extent it is sort of ridiculous - and people love the idea of getting into chainmail.”

In her debut documentary Greek director Eirini Vourloumis, who describes herself as a night creature, follows three veteran “old school” taxi drivers, Konstantinos (known as Puma), Sunny, and Giorgos, as they drive around the city. “Each character is a reflection of myself,” she underlines to BDE, adding that the film is “my personal ode to the two things I love, which is Athens and taxi drivers!”

In The Great Experiment, Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar offer what they call “a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in America,” during one of the more polarised periods in the last 250 years, from 2017 to 2020. Entirely shot in black and white, the film gives snapshots of different communities and generations, everything from ‘Gays for Trump’ activists to Black Lives Matter to the rise of MAGA. Even though politics are never far away, the film places emphasis on the people, the “humanity,” and how Americans find ways to “co-exist,” Maing tells BDE.

German Jens Schanze’s new documentary places the spotlight squarely on western governments and the rush to extract lithium, vital for everything from cellphones to the car industry, from the Bolivian Andes. “Conditions under which work is done in those mines is not far from conditions a couple of hundred years ago,” Schanze points out. Risks of accidents are very high. The exploitation of the workers is one aspect of “colonial history that you can see in the present.”

When she returns to her family home in Valparaíso (Chile), Gabriela Pena discovers more and more about what happened to her family during the Pinochet era. Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother, who is back in Spain, remains very strained. “We started to understand that travelling to this house and to this city was a way of wanting to connect with my mother,” Gabriela reflects. “From the beginning, we knew we had to combine the present with the past. That was the most difficult thing to do in the film.”

Revered Faroese actress Birita Mohr hasn’t performed for 12 years and some fans in the Faroe Islands may even have forgotten her, but her son, theatre director, actor and jazz musician Búi Dam, certainly isn’t one of them. To him, she is a legend. In his feature documentary Birita (a world premiere in CPH:DOX) he puts her back on stage to jog the public’s memory. “One of the goals with the film, and also the play, was to take care of her legacy both for the public and for the family - for my children to know who their grandmother was,” Dam tells BDE.