CPH:DOX 26

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.

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.”

The 2026 edition of CPH:DOX’s flagship financing and co-production event will bring together 101 directors and producers representing 23 countries who will present 30 new doc projects spanning early to late development and production. “The 2026 CPH:FORUM selection tells the story of the times we live in through the lenses of filmmakers who challenge the status quo, take risks and engage in dialogue with the world,” comments Mara Gourd-Mercado, Head of Industry & Training.

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.”

Matter Of Britain is a full-scale Arthurian epic - but one made in a tiny Sussex village. Peter Treherne’s film (which has just screened at CPH:DOX following its world premiere at MOMA in New York) features present-day residents of Mayfield playing characters from Thomas Malory’s 15th century classic Le Morte d’Arthur. “The idea is that if you get everybody to come together in a performative activity, people aren’t being objectified or observed in their intimate everyday,” the director tells BDE. “To some extent it is sort of ridiculous - and people love the idea of getting into chainmail.”

Fifty years after the first squatters arrived at the abandoned military barracks close to the heart of Copenhagen, the now-legendary, über-libertarian district of Christiania is still thriving. Karl Friis Forchhammer has been around the area his whole life and provides us with the full history of how a small group of people managed, through ups and downs, to build their own community. What the eponymously-titled doc implicitly underlines is that the world is a better place for having Christiania in it.

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.

Inspired by the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin and other feminist thinkers, Irene Margrethe Kaltenborn’s The Mother Age is a sumptuously filmed ode to the beauty and power of nature, in which the director all the time seeks alternative ways to relate to, and learn, from the natural world. The film acknowledges our human limitations when it comes to understanding that world, and how we must be willing to learn in order to find what we are looking for.

When the Swedish woman of his dreams fails to return to him after their whirlwind romance, the ‘untouchable’ PK Mahanandia sets out on a treacherous 6000-mile cycle ride across deserts and mountains, and over dangerous borders, to find her. No map, and with only $80 in his pocket. “The story of PK’s cycle journey is an epic adventure filled with magic, but it also really moved me,” says Oscar-winning director Orlando von Einsiedel of his new film, receiving its European premiere in Copenhagen. “His story covers such a rich tapestry of universal themes, from love and destiny to the idea of enduring hope.”

Betsy Hershey and Emma Wall’s film follows the charismatic (if slightly neurotic) US climate activist and stand-up comedian, Michael Greenberg, founder of Climate Defiance, a group which stages imaginative and very noisy protests at public events involving companies and individuals with links to fossil fuels. ‘Our goal is to help people, young people especially, feeling climate anxiety,” Wall tells Business Doc Europe. “For us, it was always about helping them feel a sense of agency and possibility so they can take a role, whatever it is.”