CPH:DOX '23

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.

Sharon-Rose Khumalo is a South African beauty queen, born and raised as a girl, who discovered that she has the genetic make-up of a male. Dimakatso Sebidi, meanwhile, is a male-presenting intersex activist. These two extraordinary characters, attractive, charismatic and funny, are the protagonists of the debut feature doc from Romanian-born Tünde Skovrán, who talks to BDE.

Swedish director Mia Engberg tells how she made her new documentary during a period when she had no idea how long she was likely to live, following a bleak, and unexpected, medical diagnosis. She had decided to make a film with just a black screen and voices, as she believed it would be her last. “But then I survived, so I just added more and more images and music and layers to the film,” Engberg says.

In After Work, world-premiering in Copenhagen, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

In Vintersaga, based on a 24-stanza epic song, albeit one composed as late as 1984, Swedish director Carl Olsson frames ordinary folk doing ordinary things. Shot in the main from a static camera, the effect is hypnotic. “It’s always a balance or a dance,” Olsson tells BDE. “How much can I can push the language, push the setting, without disturbing this very fragile authenticity?”

The story of top Finnish egamer Verneri “Bona” Junkala story is told in The Gamer, the new documentary from Finnish directors Petri Luukkainen and Jesse Jokinen. Bona has astonishing hand-eye coordination and hunger for battle. His flaw, though, is that he gets very nervous during important team tournaments, he always seems to blow it. The directors explain their feature doc to BDE.

The title refers to a top-secret UK government surveillance programme that allows the authorities to download mobile phone data from suspects stopped at UK ports. When human rights activist Muhammad Rabbani refused to hand over the passwords to his devices he was threatened with imprisonment. “Even though I started with Rabbani’s story…I wanted to make a film looking at this broader landscape around questions of digital privacy,” the director tells BDE.

In Labor, after Hanna leaves her family and girlfriend for the city of her dreams, San Francisco, a door into a new world is opened up for her, and together with dominatrix Chloe and trans Cyd she begins a journey which takes her further and further away from her life at home in Sweden. “It’s about a lot of other things,” director Tove Pils tells BDE of her film, “like longing for being part of a community and exploring your sexuality.”

Norwegian director Tonje Hessen Schei dives deep into the world of US fundamentalism in her disturbing new documentary Praying For Armageddon (co-directed with Michael Rowley and a world premiere at CPH:DOX). “It’s really shocking when you see how engrained religion is in the military industrial complex as well as warfare,” Hessen Schei tells BDE.

The film follows Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig as he travels across the former Soviet Republics…taking pictures of bus stops. “On a deeper level, a feeling of resistance and poetry is what attracted me and kept me going,” Hegnsvad, also a full-time news editor, tells Business Doc Europe of what drew him to make the documentary.