CPH:DOX 24

On the eve of CPH:DOX, Artistic Director Niklas Engstrom is philosophical on the role that doc fests can play in a world that seems increasingly broken. “Today, more than ever, the role of film festivals is so important in terms of providing a space for difficult conversations - conversations between people who do not necessarily agree. [It’s about] what art can do, what films can and especially what documentary filmmaking can do because it is so focused on real life.”

A generously revealing exploration into the life of Wilfred Buck, an elderly member of the indigenous Cree people of Canada, Lisa Jackson’s engaging film also acts as a spiritual guide to the heavens as it moves between past and present, and between Earth and the stars, aiming to overcome the ghosts of colonisation.

From the debris of the 2019 Iraqi protests, Maja Tschumi has created a beautiful, cinematic monument for its heroes. Immortals is an unusual portrait of a country, a generation and a revolution, featuring two special young protagonists from a modern society where young people now dare to dream, hope and fight. It is also a film that delivers profound emotional impact. 

Greek director Elina Psykou, whose Stray Bodies plays in CPH:DOX F:ACT AWARD, spoke to BDE about the recent protests in Thessaloniki over the film’s poster that depicts a semi-naked and pregnant Madonna nailed to the Cross. Psykou, who received online hate mail over past weeks, says she is apprehensive about the film’s wider opening in Greece on March 28, but will not be deterred from using the same poster. “I don't want to let fear conquer,” she says. “But I have to admit that after all these days, I'm very exhausted.”

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 2024, which takes place in Copenhagen March 13-24, 2024.

Sometimes docmakers struggle very hard to find their subjects. In the case of Lie To Me (international premiere March 18), the subject (Bjørn Bjercke, Bitcoin expert and whistleblower) came direct to the filmmakers, at which point they were immediately pulled into the “rabbit hole” of OneCoin, the fraudulent cryptocurrency presided over by the glamorous Bulgarian-born German swindler Ruja Ignatova, soon to be become one of the FBI’s “most wanted” felons…

When Marius the Danish giraffe was “euthanised” in 2014, there was global consternation. But in Max Kestner’s Life and Other Problems, which opens CPH:DOX 2024, the giraffe is just the starting point as Kestner spins off in multiple other directions, discussing everything from biology to physics to the emotional lives of plants and why some humans like impersonating wolves. The Danish director explains more to BDE.

At Forum, director Juan Alvaro Hein pitched his new project, a western documentary revolving around fatherhood and identity as experienced by three Danish-Argentinian gauchos. Hein described his film to the Copenhagen audience as “a simple but significant story of human connection” depicting “the downfall of nature and [of a] culture.”

Described by director Virpi Sutaari as “a kind of morality play where love for forests turns into beautiful action,” it's hard to imagine a more exquisite, convincing or perfectly crafted warning about the world’s climate crisis than Once Upon A Time In A Forest, which world-premiered March 16 at CPH:DOX. It’s an activist doc, but it doesn't always feel like one, mesmerising, instead, viewers with the astonishing beauty of Finnish nature and the dedication of those who seek to protect it.

Yance Ford’s new feature doc Power (which screened at CPH:DOX and is soon to launch on Netflix) looks at the origins of police power in the US and asks why American citizens have allowed cops to hold so much sway over their lives. The film features interviews with many leading academics who detail with chilling clarity the reasons behind 200 years of American police bias and brutality. This, as Ford puts it to Business Doc Europe, is a system with “violence, coercion and control’ at its core.