CPH:DOX 26

As British-Romanian Rachel Taparjan follows Mihaela on her return to Romania in search of her birth mother, she finds herself drawn into the unresolved shadows of her own past. For her feature doc Something Familiar, world-premiering at CPH:DOX, the act of shaping the narrative allowed Taparjan to reclaim agency over events that once felt overwhelming. “It gave me a sense of control, a sense of authorship, and ultimately a sense of empowerment,” she tells BDE. “And it gave me beauty and poetry even in very dark chapters of my life.”

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.”

In her debut documentary Greek director Eirini Vourloumis, who describes herself as a night creature, follows three veteran “old school” taxi drivers, Konstantinos (known as Puma), Sunny, and Giorgos, as they drive around the city. “Each character is a reflection of myself,” she underlines to BDE, adding that the film is “my personal ode to the two things I love, which is Athens and taxi drivers!”

The haunting, terrifying and chillingly visceral stories told by a series of young women in Paula Cury Melo’s moving and deeply provocative Scarlet Girls (Niñas escarlata) paints a harrowing picture of what it means to be a woman in the Dominican Republic, still one of the few countries where abortion remains criminalised without exception. It is a perfectly formed, elegantly artistic and gently angry film that demands attention.

In The Great Experiment, Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar offer what they call “a kaleidoscopic portrait of life in America,” during one of the more polarised periods in the last 250 years, from 2017 to 2020. Entirely shot in black and white, the film gives snapshots of different communities and generations, everything from ‘Gays for Trump’ activists to Black Lives Matter to the rise of MAGA. Even though politics are never far away, the film places emphasis on the people, the “humanity,” and how Americans find ways to “co-exist,” Maing tells BDE.

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.'

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.”

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.”

In Swiss filmmaker Ian Purnell’s feature documentary, selected for Main Competition at CPH:DOX, a cable-laying vessel traverses the high seas en route to one of the remote Aleutian Islands that separate the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean. The crew’s mission is to delivery fibre optic connectivity to the Arctic islanders, hitherto denied to them because of their sheer remoteness. Purnell connects with Business Doc Europe.

Managing to be both gently beautiful and desperately moving, Suki Chan’s Conscious explores what happens when consciousness and memory begin to disintegrate, with the haunting presence of dementia and mental decline intertwined within a series of distinctive yet similar stories. While the subject matter is familiar, the presentation here is never traditional.