Interviews

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.

You won’t find many documentaries that were conceived in more unlikely fashion than Lin Alluna’s Twice Colonized (opening CPH:DOX following its world premiere in Sundance). The director spotted Greenlandic Inuit lawyer and activist Aaju Peter by chance on the streets near the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. They’d never met before yet Peter was to become the subject of a film which would take seven years to complete.

CPH Dox is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023. “The belief that we can expand on what documentary is and what it can be, that is the red thread that has gone through the history of the festival,” comments Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm. “We want to present all the different formats and colours that documentary comes in.” (But he also wants to party, he tells BDE.)

At FIFDH co-directors Nick Read and Ayse Toprak outlined the Impact strategy for their documentary about Turkish teenage singing sensation Mutlu Kaya as she makes a remarkable journey from gunshot victim to fearless survivor. “Our impact goal is to offer victims a roadmap for survival. With her beaming smile and creative energy, Mutlu has the potential to be a role model both inside Turkey and beyond,” said Read.

Impact producers Miriam Ayoo and Chloé Genga came to Impact Days in Geneva to describe the campaign they devised for Sam Soko’s 2020 Sundance winner Softie, a film about the brilliant photographer and political activist Boniface "Softie" Mwangi as he runs for office in a regional Kenyan election, a decision that puts pressure both on his young family and on his convictions.