CPH:DOX 2025

The Polish doc industry is enjoying a busy CPH:DOX with the co-pros My Dear Théo and The Ground Beneath Our Feet in DOX:AWARD and NORDIC:DOX respectively. Words We Never Say, the new project by Agnieszka Zwiefka is selected for Forum, while a delegation of five female producers will also attend CPH:INDUSTRY. “This is very gratifying because it proves that the goal we set ourselves when we started Polish Docs has been achieved,” says Head of Polish Docs PRO Katarzyna Wilk. “Producers and filmmakers from Poland are becoming more and more aware of their strong position in the international industry.”

Viktor Nordenskiöld’s new documentary The Eukrainian profiles Ukraine's deputy prime minister Olha Stefanishyna, who is the one spearheading the country’s attempts to gain EU membership. “When I met her, I saw directly that she was somebody who could embody and personalise this complicated story. You felt her energy. She was unspoiled as a politician. She seems very honest and also very sharp,” Nordenskiöld tells BDE.

In her remarkable debut feature, Kazakh filmmaker Zhanana Kurmasheva films the invisible, and in the process achieves true cinema. In combining the endless steppe and the whispering wind with her striking montages, she manages to suggest the horror of the radiation still haunting the people living near the massive Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, which was closed – but not closed-off – in 1991.

…or how boring diplomacy can change the world, reads the logline of Arthur Franck’s satirical take on the famous 1975 conference that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire. They’re all there: Gerald Ford, Leonid Brezhnev, Finnish PM Urho Kekkonen…and Henry Kissinger. “He was a superstar,” director Franck tells BDE of the spider within the conference web. “Maybe actually a really bad guy, but he's still very fascinating, very magnetic in a way. I feel very attracted to his behaviour and his charm, even 50 years removed.”

There are two landscapes in the life of Norwegian filmmaker, Gunnar Hall Jensen. One “normal landscape” existed before his son, Jonathan, 21, was murdered in Brazil in 2023. The other is the world he lives in today defined by sorrow and trauma and for which, as he tells Business Doc Europe, “there are no maps.” Portrait Of A Confused Father world premieres in Copenhagen.

Denmark has consistently been ranked as the best country in the world to be a woman. But what does that mean for the men? They’re being outperformed at school, out earned in the workplace. To put it bluntly, they no longer wear the trousers. “If we want to make new ideal masculinity role models, then we need to give confidence to these nice men,” co-director Exner suggests to BDE. “These men are the ones that are going to give space for a woman like me to have a career.”

In her intimate and highly moving feature doc My Dear Théo, world premiering March 23, Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko documents her thoughts from the frontline in a series of letters and messages to her 5-year old son, who is living in safety in France. “I think we are the last idealists in this world, that we have this strong sense of justice, a responsibility for our country, to protect our country and to fight for freedom,” Kovalenko tells Business Doc Europe.

What is a witch? In this warm, cinematic and atmospheric documentary, Danish filmmaker Emil Nørgaard Munk portrays Andrea Hejlskov, a self-proclaimed witch, writer and public debater. It is an exciting and informative film about the spiritual world, driven by a very striking score and offering insight and understanding into why Hejlskov is so sensitive to the signs and gifts of nature…and why she so desperately wants people to listen to her.

In Girls & Gods, Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian leader of feminist group Femen, asks female priests, rabbis, imams and theologians if their beliefs and their feminism can ever be reconciled. “Our film is about this. It is about waking the silent masses of believers who don’t want violence, who don’t want patriarchy, who don’t want misogyny in their religions and also don’t want war,” says co-director Arash T. Riahi.

“I think what distinguishes CPH:DOX is that we have a curatorial line in both our festival and Industry activities that, to me at least, strikes a balance between very artistic documentary but also very popular and accessible documentary,” CPH:DOX Industry Head Mara Gourd-Mercado tells BDE on the eve of her professional programme. “And I think that that balance is something that guides us through everything that we do.”