Nordic Panorama

Pop stars, like lesser mortals, also age, get gnarly, fall out, get back together again, grow up, slow down and turn to contemplation. The Norwegian band A-ha, whom the likes of Coldplay and Kanye West cite as key musical influences, do all this and a lot more besides, and are the subject of a fascinating new feature doc by Thomas Robsahm and Aslaug Holm, who take on BDE.

Depending on how you assess him, or who you speak to, Icelandic Thorbjörn Steingrímsson is a car farmer, an inveterate hoarder or just a spare parts man. For Helga Rakel Rafnsdóttir, he is a ‘good shepherd,’ which is the Icelandic title of her film. What is beyond question is that ‘Bjössi’ has a passion for wrecked cars, hundreds of which are arranged on his small holding in the north west of Iceland. The director discusses her fascination for him with BDE.

It isn’t the typical school run, at least as understood by pushy parents in the west. Kids on their way to class in Mohamed El Aboudi’s new documentary School Of Hope (selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition) walk or cycle or ride on donkeys for many miles across the desert. The Helsinki-based director explains more to Business Doc Europe.

Raising a School Shooter is the final film in Frida and Lasse Barkfors’ trilogy about social stigma which included Pervert Park (2014), about convicted sex offenders, and Death of a Child (2017) where they meet parents responsible for their child’s death in a hot car. The filmmakers explain their new film, selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition to BDE.

A dazzling dive into the deep underbelly of drug-fuelled red light tourism in Thailand and Cambodia, looking for two missing Finnish junkies through the eyes of their former travel companion. A morally ambiguous trip into the heart of darkness. (CPH:DOX 2021 review)

A single sow and her piglets is the subject matter of Russian documentary master Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. In the film, animals which are usually thought of as meat are here observed as fellow living beings. (Berlinale 2020 review)

Even before Covid, there was loneliness. Finnish Antti Lempiäinen offers three perspectives on suffering, a recently divorced man of 80, a single mum looking for romance and a young techno-loving female gamer who roams the streets of her town in her car to find some measure of solace. The director explains his film to Business Doc Europe.

When Marius Lunde, close friend of director Frederik S. Hana, decides to track down the mother who abandoned him when he was a child, the subsequent odyssey is presented not only as emotionally charged documentary storytelling, but as a piece of bravura and inventive genre filmmaking. Hana explains his exquisite visual mash-up doc to Business Doc Europe.

Telling the extraordinary story of Amin, an Afghan refugee who came to Denmark at an early age as an unaccompanied minor, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee is selected for Documentary Competition this week at Malmö.

Finnish director Suvi West didn’t just want to tell the story of the mistreatment of Sámi people in Finland – she felt the need to tell it, she explains to Business Doc Europe. “I felt like I didn’t have any other choice,” she underlines of her film selected for Nordisk Panorama Documentary Competition.