CPH:DOX '23

Some ideas can be surprisingly simple, and the perfect execution of such an idea can result in something brilliant. That happens in The Hearing, a documentary which gives an unexpected twist to the asylum application procedure in hyper-correct Switzerland.

“I think I decided 10 years ago that I was done with filming…that there was no reason for a guy like me to go around capturing [images] Robert Flaherty-style,” maverick Swedish co-director Göran Hugo Olsson tells BDE. He wanted to collaborate, so when the opportunity to work with artist Roxy Farhat came along, he grabbed it with both hands. “And the rest is history,” says Farhat.

A puzzling documentary thriller… On the surface, it’s about French director Armel Hostiou trying to uncover who in Kinshasa set up a false Facebook profile in his name. But by digging up layer after layer of fakery, the film itself ends up looking suspiciously unreal, but in a most interesting way...

Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim has been in Copenhagen this week with his new feature, Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, about the eponymous Hollywood star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the 1990s. “When Michael and I started working together, he asked for only one thing…The thing he asked for is no violins. He didn’t want a maudlin, pitying film about a person with a sickness,” Guggenheim tells BDE.

Fremantle Documentaries unveiled March 21 its new Undeniable label, dedicated to producing world-class premium feature documentaries and series. The label will develop and produce premium projects, “and harness its global expertise to attract and work with high-profile talent and international commissioners,” the company says. 

Finnish director Juha Suonpää may never have seen an Eurasian lynx, but the bearded and grizzled Hannu certainly has. He is a keeper of the forest, and a man who has turned his back on just about all that the 21st Century has to offer. In Lynx Man, world-premiering in CPH:DOX, Suonpää not only documents the elusive cat’s re-emergence into the wilds, but profiles the life of this shaman-like guardian of nature.

Performance art and moving image interweave - and often collide - in Norwegian artist Sille Storihle’s intriguing and provocative doc which uses role-play to examine where performance begins and ends. Debate around performance art always tends to provoke an intense response, and this film pushes all the buttons as it seeks to examine the limits of artistic boundaries, if indeed they exist at all.

Greta Stocklassa’s feature doc, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, profiles Hans Blix, the Swedish politician who was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the man charged with the responsibility of determining whether or not Saddam Hussein was harbouring WMDs post-9/11. The director discusses Blix with BDE.

The world of freediving is, in equal part, terrifying, haunting, balletic and magnificent, but the possibility of death always accompanies the fame and glory that comes with breaking new deep diving records. Laura McGann’s immersive and wonderfully shot The Deepest Breath is an exhilarating love story that has enough twists-and-turns to make it a totally absorbing experience.

The Netflix doc follows the painstaking investigations of Rae de Leon into the disturbing number of cases of young women across the US who report sexual assault to the police, only to end up being charged themselves. “Rae absolutely doesn’t give up. She is totally pragmatic, she is polite always…and she is just so persistent,” Schwartzman tells BDE of the “self-effacing and humble” journalist.