Interviews

Denmark has consistently been ranked as the best country in the world to be a woman. But what does that mean for the men? They’re being outperformed at school, out earned in the workplace. To put it bluntly, they no longer wear the trousers. “If we want to make new ideal masculinity role models, then we need to give confidence to these nice men,” co-director Exner suggests to BDE. “These men are the ones that are going to give space for a woman like me to have a career.”

In her intimate and highly moving feature doc My Dear Théo, world premiering March 23, Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko documents her thoughts from the frontline in a series of letters and messages to her 5-year old son, who is living in safety in France. “I think we are the last idealists in this world, that we have this strong sense of justice, a responsibility for our country, to protect our country and to fight for freedom,” Kovalenko tells Business Doc Europe.

In Girls & Gods, Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian leader of feminist group Femen, asks female priests, rabbis, imams and theologians if their beliefs and their feminism can ever be reconciled. “Our film is about this. It is about waking the silent masses of believers who don’t want violence, who don’t want patriarchy, who don’t want misogyny in their religions and also don’t want war,” says co-director Arash T. Riahi.

“I think what distinguishes CPH:DOX is that we have a curatorial line in both our festival and Industry activities that, to me at least, strikes a balance between very artistic documentary but also very popular and accessible documentary,” CPH:DOX Industry Head Mara Gourd-Mercado tells BDE on the eve of her professional programme. “And I think that that balance is something that guides us through everything that we do.”

Traditionally based in the Pompidou Centre and opening March 22, the 47th edition has shifted this year to Paris’ Latin Quarter, and will take place across a series of commercial cinemas. There are 37 films in the competition, showcasing, as the festival tells us, ‘documentary creation in all its diversity, as well as world, international, or French premieres.’ Core to events is ParisDOC, the festival’s industry forum, which kicks off March 25.

“I just tried mentally and physically to make myself small and invisible,” Norwegian director and photographer Monica Strømdahl tells BDE how she blended into the background when making her debut feature documentary, Flophouse America (in International Competition in CPH:DOX and also screening in Movies That Matter and Visions Du Reel). The film is set almost entirely within the tiny, cramped hotel room Mikal shares with his alcoholic parents and where he has lived almost all his life.

In his new feature doc Everest Dark, a world premiere in Copenhagen, Canadian director Jereme Watt tells the story of Mingma Tsiri Sherpa’s attempts to retrieve bodies left on Everest (“Chomolungma”) as an act of tribute to a God angered by death and desecration on the mountain. A man without ego, the Sherpa has himself climbed the mountain nineteen times. “I thought, wow, this guy is an incredible mountaineer. He has helped countless people reach the summit and he is not even an afterthought to their success,” Watt tells BDE.

“I was amazed by her. I liked the way she spoke…since the very beginning, she has been defying the Taliban,” Austrian filmmaker Natalie Halla says of Manizha Bakhtar, Afghan ambassador to Austria and the fiery protagonist of Halla’s new feature doc The Last Ambassador, screening in F:ACT AWARD at CPH and sold by The Party Film Sales.

The Hague-based Movies That Matter human rights festival opens March 21 with the screening of Dutch filmmaker Daan Veldhuizen’s The Promise, selected for the Oscar-qualifying Grand Jury Documentary Competition. “We get very high-end international films that have their world premieres at Movies That Matter - high-end films that have a huge impact,” Artistic Director Margje de Koning tells BDE. The festival runs March 21-29.

When Icelandic filmmaker Yrsa Roca Fannberg isn’t making films she is to be found working in a nursing home for the elderly in Reykjavik, which inspired her observational and poetic new documentary, world-premiering in Copenhagen. “Working there, I see death. It’s a natural thing. But there is so much life. And you don’t do the residents any favours by having this story be sentimental, because most of them are prepared for death. It’s not a tragedy to die when you are 95,” the director tells BDE.