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The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY awards 2024 were announced March 21 in Copenhagen. Four awards were handed out to CPH:FORUM projects looking for gap-financing as well as CPH:LAB projects with their focus on immersive non-fiction. Three CPH:LAB project awards were handed out at the Prototype Event in Odd Fellow Palace on March 18. All winners…

Traversing the majestic Andean Highlands, the Atacama Desert and the Coastal Cliffs, the documentary Unwelcomed unveils the harsh reality of the migration crisis in Latin America and northern Chile’s radicalisation. The pic, set to premiere in 2025 and directed by Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez and Amilcar Infante, was one of the WIP projects presented at CPH:DOX 2024.

Inspired by the wild popularity of American WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) in India, two brothers create their own wrestling league. Assembling a band of aspiring wrestlers, they put at stake money, social acceptance and love, in pursuit of a daring dream. This is the premise of The Dirty Dream, pitched at CPH:DOX 2024 and helmed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh who were Oscar-nominated filmmakers for their 2021 doc Writing with Fire.

At CPH:DOX 2024, BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated director Ursula Macfarlane (The Lost Sons, Untouchable, Charlie Hebdo: 3 Days That Shook Paris) and award-winning producer Mandy Chang pitched their new feature, whose working title is The Second Woman. One of the buzziest projects presented at this year’s edition, it promises to be a radical, provocative documentary built around a legendary 24-hour play starring actor Ruth Wilson.

At CPH:DOX 2024, Business Doc Europe attended the WIP presentation of John Webster’s new doc Burnt Heart. In it, a group of Finnish firefighters form a specialist brigade to prepare for the large wildfires of the future. They travel to Portugal to learn from their elite colleagues already fighting on the frontlines of our climate emergency. He defined Burnt Earth as “a character-driven story about very relatable, ordinary people doing something extraordinary.”

“This is the place to be,” First Hand Films CEO and founder Esther van Messel enthuses about CPH:DOX. “There is something about having another IDFA in the spring…all in all, I really feel this place is taking care of film as an art but also as a marketplace.” Nonetheless, the First Hand Films boss sees continuing stresses in the doc sector even as memories of the pandemic recede into the distance.

At Forum, director Juan Alvaro Hein pitched his new project, a western documentary revolving around fatherhood and identity as experienced by three Danish-Argentinian gauchos. Hein described his film to the Copenhagen audience as “a simple but significant story of human connection” depicting “the downfall of nature and [of a] culture.”

Three Catalan documentaries will compete in the Official Section of the DocsBarcelona 2024 International Documentary Film Festival, and nine more will compete in the new Docs&Cat section. A total of twelve titles make up the DocsBarcelona's “firmest commitment to the Catalan creative talent and industry, with which the event vindicates the particular look that Catalan cinema dedicates to the documentary genre,” write organisers.

The official selection includes 165 films from 50 different countries, with gender parity for the second year running, the festival underlines. These include 88 world premieres and 14 international premieres. The 55th edition will open with the Danish film As the Tide Comes In by Juan Palacios (co-directed by Sofie Husum Johannesen). VdR 2024 runs 12-21 April.

On March 18, CPH:DOX 2024 hosted the DISCO Network’s Independence Project presentation and workshop, which advocates for independent documentaries across culture, society, and democracy. The 90-minute event, titled “Our Declaration of Independence,” saw the participation of Beadie Finzi, Director of Doc Society, and Jad Abi-Khalil, Executive Director of Lebanon-based cultural association for Arab Cinema Aflamuna (formerly known as Beirut DC).