Wendy Mitchell

When Icelandic filmmaker Yrsa Roca Fannberg isn’t making films she is to be found working in a nursing home for the elderly in Reykjavik, which inspired her observational and poetic new documentary, world-premiering in Copenhagen. “Working there, I see death. It’s a natural thing. But there is so much life. And you don’t do the residents any favours by having this story be sentimental, because most of them are prepared for death. It’s not a tragedy to die when you are 95,” the director tells BDE.

It takes a brave filmmaking team to pivot when the story they thought they were telling suddenly changes – and also to realise when they’ve become a protagonist in the story. That’s what happened with Walls – Akinni Inuk, directed by Denmark’s Sofie Rørdam and Greenland’s Nina Paninnguaq Skydsbjerg. The film has its world premiere at CPH:DOX on March 21. The directors talk to Business Doc Europe.

The Danish-born, New York-based director discusses her new feature doc, a climate change-themed story about a teenage brother and sister who face relocation from the sinking Louisiana island that they have always called home. “There are amazing films that put the stats and science first, but I think my strengths are something else. I love hanging out with people for a long time and observing them,” Winther tells BDE.

In After Work, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

At the heart of Damsgård & Klovborg’s film about the ISIS kidnapping of Danish photographer Daniel Rye is an incendiary interview, conducted by journalist Sean Langan, with two of the British kidnappers, infamously known as the Beatles. “As an interviewer, he makes just about every mistake in the handbook, but still he somehow succeeds in getting something to happen in that room that’s hard to explain,” says Klovborg.

In After Work, world-premiering in Copenhagen, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

It has been a whirlwind week for Sweden’s Mikel Cee Karlsson. On Sunday he was in Los Angeles at the Oscars as editor of Ruben Östlund’s triple-nominated Triangle of Sadness. Now he comes to CPH:DOX with his latest film as a director, A Tiger In Paradise in Dox:Award. The director speaks with Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 18 world-prem.

Lea Glob first met Apolonia Sokol in 2009 – when Glob was a film student in Copenhagen and Sokol was a bohemian art student in Paris. Sokol’s life journey has taken tumultuous twists and turns in those intervening 13 years – she is now an internationally award-winning painter – and Glob has been there to document every step of the way, she explains to BDE.

After chancing upon Winslow, Arizona – during a long drive he needed a place to sleep for the night – veteran Danish doccer Jon Bang Carlsen ended up falling in love with the place, and decided to set his latest doc there, about teenagers exploring the idea of freedom. “They all have some kind of scars,” the director says of his young cast. “Those scars can either bring them down or could make them wiser and more prepared to go on in life.”

In 2015, Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed was shooting a promo video for a physical rehabilitation centre when he met Estrid, who was then just 12 years old. She was doing rehab after falling out a fifth-floor window four months beforehand, which left her with 17 fractures but remarkably no brain injury. The director discusses Estrid’s subsequent six-year odyssey with BDE.