CPH:DOX 24

“This is the place to be,” First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel enthuses about CPH:DOX. “There is something about having another IDFA in the spring…all in all, I really feel this place is taking care of film as an art but also as a marketplace.” Nonetheless, the First Hand Films boss sees continuing stresses in the doc sector even as memories of the pandemic recede into the distance.

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.”

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.

A playfully self-aware film-within-a-film, My First Film veers between moments of blissful joy through to self-doubt and untold truths, but is always driven by director/creator Zia Anger’s refined and astute sense of what she is trying to deliver, and given energy by a cast and crew that buy into her vision.

Even at the age of nine, Iranian Melina has already learned to deal with disillusionment and broken promises - she sees her mother much less than is promised; her father uses Melina's passport, which is in his possession, to exercise power. With great patience, respect and attentiveness, the filmmaker has made a very personal and relatable story of a universal phenomenon: the child who, between two bickering parents, has to fend for themselves.

An engaging and illuminating hybrid documentary that reflects a spectrum of autistic experiences, the intriguingly titled The Stimming Pool is co-created by a group autistic directors, known as the “Neurocultures Collective” (Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker) along with artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, and offers up an artistic interpretation of what it is like to live with neurodivergence.

What if you meticulously recorded your entire life as a single, working mother on your smartphone? Award winning filmmaker Victoria Mapplebeck did just that and has created a compelling document of what it means to raise a son without a father. Motherboard is a film that navigates successfully the fine line between emotional exhibitionism and a fervent desire to debunk the myths of motherhood.

The shadow of Jurassic Park looms long over the various characters who discuss their involvement in the high-stakes world of dinosaur bone collection and trading. In this world, it’s a race against time between high-minded and determined palaeontologists and well-equipped bone dealers, making for an enjoyably eye-opening – and strikingly shot - documentary about dinosaur bones, big cash and even bigger big egos.

Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s delicious and elegiac feature documentary describes a love triangle of sorts, between a female Irish aristocrat, the revered 20th Century architect Le Corbusier and the house that she built in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur, which he later appropriated. Minger had been pre-warned about the allure of the brilliant Eileen Gray. “Beatrice, be careful because if you enter the Gray zone, you'll never get out of it,” she was told.

On March 18, CPH:DOX 2024 hosted the DISCO Network’s Independence Project presentation and workshop, which advocates for independent documentaries across culture, society, and democracy. The 90-minute event, titled “Our Declaration of Independence,” saw the participation of Beadie Finzi, Director of Doc Society, and Jad Abi-Khalil, Executive Director of Lebanon-based cultural association for Arab Cinema Aflamuna (formerly known as Beirut DC).