CPH:DOX 26

In Oscar-nominated Sara Dosa’s new feature doc, produced by National Geographic, renowned Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his film archives into a time capsule to hold onto the memory both of his country’s diminishing glaciers and his beloved grandparents. “I think for me, both as a person and a filmmaker, I'm endlessly inspired by the power of nature, and how humans can co-create story and meaning with nature,” Dosa tells Business Doc Europe.

The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY Awards 2026 were announced March 19, with the Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award, valued at €30,000, going to Don’t Let The Sun Go Up On Me by director Asmae El Moudir and producer Emma Lepers. The Sandbox Films Science Pitch Prize 2026, worth $25,000, went to Matrescence by Kathryn Ferguson. produced by Eleanor Emptage, Rosie Crerar. All awards…

When thousands of dead and dying crabs and lobsters were washed up on beaches in the North East of England, director Jeanie Finlay quickly realised she had stumbled on an extraordinary but very grim story about the wanton destruction of marine life and the knock-on effect on fishing communities. Her new documentary, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, investigates the event. What’s more, it will be released by Glimmerama, the recently announced distribution arm of Glimmer Films, the production company owned by Finlay, who explains more to BDE.

In Spanish director María Molina Peiró’s lyrical and impressionistic Como Todo Mortal (Like Any Other Mortal), selected for CPH:DOX NEXT:WAVE, a remote robot searches a distant planet...

Irish filmmaker Gar O’Rourke (Sanatorium) returned to CPH:DOX this year with The Siege of Paradise, a character-driven documentary exploring the human consequences of over-tourism in Italy’s Cinque Terre. “A few years ago an Italian friend told me about this small place of fewer than 4,000 people receiving more than four million tourists every year,” O’Rourke recalled. “I wanted to understand what that actually felt like.”

Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche sat down with BDE to discuss her audacious directorial debut In-I In Motion, which records how, in the radical theatrical piece In-I (2007), she set out to dismantle the boundaries between movement and acting, together with acclaimed British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan. At the same time the pair explored the complexities of love and lust, devotion and jealousy, separation and reconciliation.

Tom Adjibi’s slyly subversive debut feature This Is Not A French Film [screening this week in NEXT:WAVE competition at CPH:DOX] exposes the bias and racism that non-white actors and artists still continually face in their careers. The director plays a version of himself - Tom, an actor so exasperated at being typecast that he decides to make a movie about it. “I have convictions, I have anger but sometimes my character is a little bit lost,” he describes to BDE the version of Tom we see in the movie.

n absorbing and provocative documentary, sometimes featuring moments of graphic violence, the evocatively titled Hell’s Army follows the brutal rise of Russian mercenary group The Wagner Group and its bloody work from Donbas through to Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic, before its brutal return to full-scale war in Ukraine.

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir presented her new hybrid doc project Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me, which concerns teenager Fatimazahra who, before her sad passing, suffered from xeroderma pigmentosum (XP), a rare genetic condition that makes exposure to sunlight potentially fatal. Now her younger sister Meriem carries forward Fatimazahra’s dream of travelling to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, where the polar night allows for months without sunlight. “I’m looking for ways to keep her alive,” the filmmaker explained. “Through her voice, through her own images — creating a dialogue between the living and the absent.”

A wonderfully well-observed and deeply compassionate film, Jeanie Finlay’s All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea is set against the backdrop of the deprived North-East coast of England, and shines the light on an unusual group of environmental activists, a deep-rooted fishing community fighting for survival and pleading for support from a Government that seems to lack any interest in their plight.