Interviews

In Labor, after Hanna leaves her family and girlfriend for the city of her dreams, San Francisco, a door into a new world is opened up for her, and together with dominatrix Chloe and trans Cyd she begins a journey which takes her further and further away from her life at home in Sweden. “It’s about a lot of other things,” director Tove Pils tells BDE of her film, “like longing for being part of a community and exploring your sexuality.”

Norwegian director Tonje Hessen Schei dives deep into the world of US fundamentalism in her disturbing new documentary Praying For Armageddon (co-directed with Michael Rowley and a world premiere at CPH:DOX). “It’s really shocking when you see how engrained religion is in the military industrial complex as well as warfare,” Hessen Schei tells BDE.

The film follows Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig as he travels across the former Soviet Republics…taking pictures of bus stops. “On a deeper level, a feeling of resistance and poetry is what attracted me and kept me going,” Hegnsvad, also a full-time news editor, tells Business Doc Europe of what drew him to make the documentary.

CPH:INDUSTRY kicks off in earnest March 20 with a chock-a-block 6-day programme of masterclasses, case studies, talks, debates and screenings, not to mention the 33-project CPH:Forum selection of new projects. “CPH:INDUSTRY is reflecting a deep connection with the festival side of CPH:DOX. All what we do embodies the same philosophy, the same values and a deep interest in non-fiction art, science and the society,” says Industry boss Tereza Simikova.

When US filmmaker Madeleine Gavin was first approached to make a film on North Korea, she was reluctant to become involved. The producers had secured the rights to The Girl With Seven Names, the memoir by Hyeonseo Lee, one of the most high profile North Korean defectors. As Gavin tells BDE, she finally agreed to take on the assignment - but she was determined to broaden its scope and tell a more contemporary story.

“I wanted to make a hymn to nature and to my parents and my ancestors,” Norwegian director Margreth Olin tells BDE of her epic new documentary Songs of Earth, world-premiering at CPH:DOX and filmed beside Europe’s largest inland glacier, the same one that dominated the landscape where Olin grew up. “I wanted nature to be the main character of the film.” But, as we see, Songs of Earth is as much an ode to her dear father.

It has been a whirlwind week for Sweden’s Mikel Cee Karlsson. On Sunday he was in Los Angeles at the Oscars as editor of Ruben Östlund’s triple-nominated Triangle of Sadness. Now he comes to CPH:DOX with his latest film as a director, A Tiger In Paradise in Dox:Award. The director speaks with Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 18 world-prem.

At the age of nine, Ugandan Dominic Ongwen was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Years later, he is standing trial for war crimes in the Hague. “Many people see him as a victim, as a boy whose life was interrupted by this abduction. Some don’t understand this line that we [have] in the West, that once you become an adult, you suddenly stop being a victim,” co-director Lukasz Konopa tells Business Doc Europe.

Katrine Kiilgaard talks to Business Doc Europe about her relief in putting on a festival post-pandemic, why the focus must be on emerging talent and, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX, how the festival is reflecting on its history (and what is yet to come) via two core programmes: Predicting the Past and Rewriting the Future.

This year’s CPH:DOX has 17 immersive projects on display, a record number. Casting his eye over the VR selection, CPH:LAB’s Head of Studies Mark Atkin notes an intriguing trend - the use of gaming tools. “I am really conscious that creativity precedes innovation. It is through the experiments of artists such as these that we learn what these tools are really good at. It is their pioneering efforts that willed what will become the metaverse,” he tells BDE.