CPH:DOX '23

CPH:INDUSTRY kicks off in earnest March 20 with a chock-a-block 6-day programme of masterclasses, case studies, talks, debates and screenings, not to mention the 33-project CPH:Forum selection of new projects. “CPH:INDUSTRY is reflecting a deep connection with the festival side of CPH:DOX. All what we do embodies the same philosophy, the same values and a deep interest in non-fiction art, science and the society,” says Industry boss Tereza Simikova.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.

Lightdox is expanding its sales operations into France, MD Anna Berthollet told BDE on the eve of CPH:DOX 2023. With a new base in Annecy, the move will allow the Swiss company “to explore all the new opportunities around impact and semi-theatrical distribution, and basically to do more crafted work for films that we engage on board each year,” she said. The company will handle sales on new CPH docs Motherland and The Other Profile.

The lines and layers between doc and drama are well and truly blurred (if not obliterated) in Ane Hjort Guttu’s film Voice, about a docmaker from Norwegian TV who meets resistance when she contacts a group of media-making activists to tell their story. Whatever it actually is, the film certainly delivers some astute commentary on what happens when you have to bring everyone into the editing room in the name of co-creation.

“I wanted to make a hymn to nature and to my parents and my ancestors,” Norwegian director Margreth Olin tells BDE of her epic new documentary Songs of Earth, world-premiering at CPH:DOX and filmed beside Europe’s largest inland glacier, the same one that dominated the landscape where Olin grew up. “I wanted nature to be the main character of the film.” But, as we see, Songs of Earth is as much an ode to her dear father.

It has been a whirlwind week for Sweden’s Mikel Cee Karlsson. On Sunday he was in Los Angeles at the Oscars as editor of Ruben Östlund’s triple-nominated Triangle of Sadness. Now he comes to CPH:DOX with his latest film as a director, A Tiger In Paradise in Dox:Award. The director speaks with Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 18 world-prem.

At the age of nine, Ugandan Dominic Ongwen was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Years later, he is standing trial for war crimes in the Hague. “Many people see him as a victim, as a boy whose life was interrupted by this abduction. Some don’t understand this line that we [have] in the West, that once you become an adult, you suddenly stop being a victim,” co-director Lukasz Konopa tells Business Doc Europe.

Life-affirming and gently moving, director/editor/cinematographer Jella Bethmann’s highly watchable Mrs Hansen & The Bad Companions manages to restore our faith in humanity within a world that seems determined to sideline society’s waifs and strays.

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.

Katrine Kiilgaard talks to Business Doc Europe about her relief in putting on a festival post-pandemic, why the focus must be on emerging talent and, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX, how the festival is reflecting on its history (and what is yet to come) via two core programmes: Predicting the Past and Rewriting the Future.