CPH:DOX 26

When she returns to her family home in Valparaíso (Chile), Gabriela Pena discovers more and more about what happened to her family during the Pinochet era. Meanwhile, her relationship with her mother, who is back in Spain, remains very strained. “We started to understand that travelling to this house and to this city was a way of wanting to connect with my mother,” Gabriela reflects. “From the beginning, we knew we had to combine the present with the past. That was the most difficult thing to do in the film.”

Elisabeth Rasmussen’s rigorous sophomore documentary follows micrometeorite enthusiast and former jazz musician Jon Larsen who claims to have located real stardust here on Earth, despite extreme scepticism from the scientific establishment. “I want the film to reach people who might be inspired or comforted,” Rasmussen explains her intentions to BDE. “It’s about feeling connected – to each other and to the stars.”

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.

Wandering through the forest, foraging for fungi, indigenous mycologists Juli and Lis are literally following in their ancestors’ footsteps while also contributing to scientific knowledge and sustaining their communities. Beautifully filmed, the documentary portrays the mycelium as a living, breathing and talking entity connected to all of the forest – and to all of us.

Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc presented his new investigative documentary project, titled Director’s Cut, at the CPH:DOX Forum 2026, offering a behind-the-scenes look at humanitarian aid operations in times of war, and the murky intersection between crisis response, political influence and media narratives. “Slowly, I understood that goodwill here is laundered into power, control and profit,” he says.

German Jens Schanze’s new documentary places the spotlight squarely on western governments and the rush to extract lithium, vital for everything from cellphones to the car industry, from the Bolivian Andes. “Conditions under which work is done in those mines is not far from conditions a couple of hundred years ago,” Schanze points out. Risks of accidents are very high. The exploitation of the workers is one aspect of “colonial history that you can see in the present.”

Pieter-Jan De Pue’s dramatic new documentary Mariinka (sold by Films Boutique and opening CPH:DOX) is the culmination of a full decade of work and has evolved greatly over that period, with one of the featured Zolotko brothers fighting for Russia while another fights for Ukraine. What’s more, the Ukrainian city of Mariinka has been turned into “a land full of rubble…there is nothing that stands there,” De Pue laments to Business Doc Europe.

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.

Shot compassionately and astutely over a 10-year period, One In a Million charts the course of a young life as an 11-year girl escapes Syria to make the long journey to Germany with her family, frightened but also excited about her new future. Thoughtful and engaging, and made with a real sense of heart, it is a story of family and exile, and of hope and change.

Excellent film, wrong genre. Whispers in May blurs the boundaries of the hybrid documentary subgenre to such an extent that its documentary status becomes unclear. This doesn’t mean its story is any less engaging or its young leads any less mesmerising. It is a very enjoyable watch – it’s just that it would better be labelled ‘fiction.'