CPH:DOX 2021

When Swedish filmmaker Engeli Broberg met an eight-year-old named Gabi nearly seven years ago, she thought she might make an interesting short film subject. But quickly she decided, “I wanted to stay with her for longer.” Now Gabi is the fascinating young protagonist of Broberg’s first feature-length doc. The director explains why to BDE.

Raising a School Shooter is the final film in Frida and Lasse Barkfors’ trilogy about social stigma which included Pervert Park (2014), about convicted sex offenders, and Death of a Child (2017) where they meet parents responsible for their child’s death in a hot car. The filmmakers explain their new film, selected for Nordic:Dox Competition, to BDE.

When Finnish filmmaker Tuija Halttunen looks up at the clouds, she sees herself. As she explains to BDE of her film selected for Nordic:Dox Competition, “I strongly feel that I am part of this world in physical levels in many ways. Clouds have a life span like we do. We can see a summary of our choices during our lives in those clouds.”

As she approaches her final CPH:DOX (running April 21-May 12) before departing to become Director of the National Film School Denmark, Business Doc Europe finds the event’s founder and CEO Tine Fischer in resolute mood.

Filmmaker Gorki Glaser-Müller was a fan of Patricio Galvez, a musician and fellow Chilean living in Sweden. But as he tells BDE, the director never imagined that he would end up accompanying Galvez on a journey to Syria to rescue his seven grandchildren, nor that he would make a film about it.

“It was all triggered when an Albanian scholar told me that this subject had been done a thousand times and never correctly,” Slovenian director Marija Zidar recalls to Business Doc Europe of the circumstances which led to her making Reconciliation (a premiere at CPHDOX in Next Wave Award this month).

A documentary which manages the seemingly impossible feat of merging myth and actuality, thereby becoming mythological itself without diminishing the impact of its factual reporting on the disappearing reindeer and reappearing mammoths of the Siberian tundra.

There are warmer, easier places to make documentaries than Siberia. This, though, is where intrepid Belgian independent director Liesbeth De Ceulaer headed to make her bold new doc/drama hybrid feature, Holgut (a joint world premiere both at Visions du Réel and at CPH: DOX). The director explains why to BDE.

Czech director Pavel Borecký’s eco-documentary Living Water is on quite a run. It is showing in Visions du Réel in National Competition; in the CPH:SCIENCE section of CPH:DOX shortly afterward and then in Movies That Matter in the Netherlands in a screening arranged in co-operation with the Dutch Ministry Of Foreign Affairs.

CPH:DOX presented March 30 its 2021 selection of 180 new films, interactive art, live debates and talks with artists, experts and opinion makers. The digital festival will be available on CPH:DOX’s digital platform April 21 to May 5. Between May 6 and May 12, a selection of films will be screened in Copenhagen newly-opened cinema theatres.