CPH:DOX 2025

“The idea was to give back to the industry after 25 amazing years,” First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel explains just why the company created its own First Hand Fund Diversity Fund to give out €25,000 in awards in cash and kind to a wide range of filmmakers and projects. Seven winners have now been chosen from over 100 submissions. She is also eyeing up a busy Spring, starting this week at CPH:DOX.

Human Race by Danish director Simon Lec covers both the scientific research by his compatriot, evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, into the ancient human genome, and the scientist’s ‘race’ for international recognition – specifically the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, in the CPH world-premiere doc, the latter tends to overshadow the former.

“I just tried mentally and physically to make myself small and invisible,” Norwegian director and photographer Monica Strømdahl tells BDE how she blended into the background when making her debut feature documentary, Flophouse America (in International Competition in CPH:DOX and also screening in Movies That Matter and Visions Du Reel). The film is set almost entirely within the tiny, cramped hotel room Mikal shares with his alcoholic parents and where he has lived almost all his life.

The familiar story of attempting to overcome a traumatic injury is given additional resonance with this story of a Norwegian MMA fighter whose personality is tied to his physicality. But Geir Kåre Nyland has to try and deal with a frightening new existence, while also attempting to face up to family and personal traumas long unaddressed that have impacted on the way he deals with life.

In his new feature doc Everest Dark, a world premiere in Copenhagen, Canadian director Jereme Watt tells the story of Mingma Tsiri Sherpa’s attempts to retrieve bodies left on Everest (“Chomolungma”) as an act of tribute to a God angered by death and desecration on the mountain. A man without ego, the Sherpa has himself climbed the mountain nineteen times. “I thought, wow, this guy is an incredible mountaineer. He has helped countless people reach the summit and he is not even an afterthought to their success,” Watt tells BDE.

“I was amazed by her. I liked the way she spoke…since the very beginning, she has been defying the Taliban,” Austrian filmmaker Natalie Halla says of Manizha Bakhtar, Afghan ambassador to Austria and the fiery protagonist of Halla’s new feature doc The Last Ambassador, screening in F:ACT AWARD at CPH and sold by The Party Film Sales.

Sounding like they come from a novel by George Orwell or Franz Kafka, the rather niche section of the Stockholm Police evocatively named The Dialogue Police are actually a special unit whose well-intentioned mission is to strengthen democracy and ensure the right of all citizens to say what they want. Susanna Edwards’ fascinating and immersive fly-on-the-wall feature doc receives its international premiere at CPH:DOX.

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.

The Berlin-based company is managing sales on Ai Weiwei’s Turandot and The Helsinki Effect, along with several other high-profile titles. Additionally, it is presenting the inaugural Rise and Shine Award at CPH:Forum, a €3,000 prize awarded to the best pitch project with international potential. “We live and breathe documentary,” says Rise and Shine World Sales managing director Stefan Kloos, expressing the passion that has driven the company since its founding in 2008.

When the much-loved footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović alienated his most loyal fans in his home town of Malmö by investing in a rival football club, the statue that had been erected in his honour suddenly lost its nose. In their documentary, world-premiering March 20 in Copenhagen (just across the water from Malmö), Nils Toftenow, Mathias Rosberg and Olle Toftenow set out to solve the mystery of the missing hooter. “Zlatan’s nose is almost like a metaphor for searching for the meaning of life,” says Nils.