CPH:DOX '23

CPH:DOX last week hosted a conversation on the craft of doc with two brilliant women filmmakers – Estonia’s Anna Hints, director of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood and Chile’s Maite Alberdi, director of The Eternal Memory, both Sundance-winning films. The talk, moderated by film journalist Wendy Mitchell, focused on these docs, in particular on their protagonists’ vulnerability, the directors’ sense of moral compass and some of their artistic and technical choices.

Welcome to Funky Town, the hippest club in Chengdu, China, and the centre of the city’s thriving underground party scene. The documentary came about after Yihao, one of director Mullinkosson’s most flamboyant friends, discovered he was a filmmaker. “He asked when I would film him. I said how about Saturday night?” the director tells BDE.

A beautiful and grim fairy tale about a Russian bird of paradise looking for a place to spread its wings. The film testifies to the power of art and shows why so many of those in power within Russia are rightfully afraid of the country’s artists and creatives.

With 200 new films, 100+ world premieres. 61 titles across five international competitions, “CPH:DOX is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a powerful film programme full of artistic quality and contemporary relevance,” write organisers. An impressive roster of international guests includes Joan Baez, Oliver Stone, Nathan Fielder, Wim Wenders, Susan Matthews, José Gonzales and Jeremy Deller among many others.

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.

An engagingly playful Los Angeles-based hybrid feature doc which is rendered even more striking by its astute use of sign language and subtitles by a director who is, herself, d/Deaf. The film dwells upon a series of mysterious tuba thefts and therefore silence and sound are key components in O’Daniel’s unique and impactful experience.

Nine new international immersive documentary projects have been selected for CPH:DOX’s talent development and training programme, CPH:LAB. The participants will go through an intense development phase and be ready to present their prototypes at CPH:DOX 2023.

A disturbing and brutal delve into the dark and violent underbelly of military conscription in Belarus as seen from the perspective of the country’s much put-upon youth, Motherland offers a striking – and deeply prescient – analysis of a system of bullying and abuse borrowed from neighbouring Russia, and how it is reflected in the country itself.

The Greenland-Denmark doc Twice Colonized by Lin Alluna will open this year's CPH:DOX on March 15. The film will also compete in NEXT:WAVE competition. “Twice Colonized deals with the personal consequences of colonialism and gives us a much-needed new perspective on the colonial history of Denmark, as well as in the rest of the world,” comments CPH:DOX Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm. The festival runs March 15-26.

Fredrik Gertten’s new film, a world premiere in CPH:DOX F:act Award section, takes on corrupt fraudsters and kleptocrats around the world. “The idea [behind the film] was that all frustrations and all uprisings, good or bad, around the planet, have the same source, the same anger,” the director tells Business Doc Europe.