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The ethical and environmental issues around industrial farmed animal production may form the worrying and often disturbing backdrop to Saila Kivelä and Vesa Kuosmanen’s often provocative documentary, but at heart it is a film about relationships and how they can become severely strained when emotions run high, and how political savvy must strike a fine balance with activism.

In Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing’s Dox:Award Competition documentary, against the backdrop of a country torn apart by terrible religious and political conflict, two women from either side of the divide do their best as midwives in one of the remoter regions of Myanmar.

As Alexei Navalny says at the start of this film, “let’s make a thriller," adding that were he to die then direct Daniel Roher was free to make "a boring movie about memory.” Despite constant pressure from the Russian authorities and a poison attempt back in 2020, Putin’s political nemesis didn’t die, and so Roher’s film does indeed take the form of a gripping thriller…one all the more chilling and prescient given the current situation in Russia and Ukraine.

If you can overcome the at-times unnecessarily dramatic voice-over, Moosa Lane is a beautiful documentary about bridging the gap between two cultures - the one the director was born into and the one she was formed out of.

The backdrop might well be the hard streets of Ukraine, but the themes of Outside are universal ones – the story of a young man growing up on the streets, lost within an uncaring system and struggling to break free from a cycle of petty criminality and rebellion…a lost soul for sure, but also one that director Olha Zhurba has come to worry about and care for.

Seeing a white man in South Sudan explaining to soldiers and their superiors how to fight a war in a ‘humane’ way screams of neo-colonialism. Which makes Rules of War, selected for F:act Award Competition, an uncomfortable yet fascinating and provoking watch, which leaves you with mixed emotions and a lot of questions.

Doc Alliance, the creative union of seven major European documentary festivals, has unveiled the shortlist of 14 nominees for the 2022 Doc Alliance Awards, to be handed out during the Doc Day lunch in Cannes on May 24. Seven films will compete for the awards in each of the Best Feature Film and Best Short Film categories.

A spectacular delve beneath the Greenland ice sheet, Lars Ostenfeld’s memorable film Into the Ice (Rejsen til Isens Indre) – which opens this year’s CPH:DOX – is both a treat for the eyes but also a wake-up call (if one were needed) for the scale and consequences of the climate crisis.

Buyers turn to David France’s How to Survive a Pandemic, which world premiered at the recent Thessaloniki Doc Fest, and Jennifer Peedom’s River, produced by Stranger Than Fiction in association with Arrow Pictures and commissioned by Australian broadcaster ABC and the BBC, described as a retelling of the history both of rivers and human civilisation. The two films are screening at this year’s CPH:DOX.

The new director of the Sarajevo Film Festival Jovan Marjanović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), the winner of last year's Grand Prix Jessica Beshir (Faya Dayi) and Beatrice Fiorentino, General Delegate of Venice Critics’ Week, will deliberate over the 16 International Feature Comp selections before handing over the Grand Jury Prize and Special Jury Award, worth CHF 20,000 and CHF 10,000 respectively. Read on for all section juries and prizes.