Reviews

A maelstrom of images poetically reflects Life on Earth in this short film by Danish video artist Jeppe Lange, co-directed by Google’s Image Recognition AI, at the same time providing a cosmic trip for the viewer. World-premiering in CPH:DOX New:Vision, it’s like an alien intelligence is sifting through images representative of the planet - and trying to make sense of them.

Modern day fairy tales don’t include princes and white horses anymore, unless as a prop perhaps in a carefully composed video. Who needs Prince Charming when you can be a successful influencer and live a life filled with online love? Girl Gang, selected for DOX:Award Competition, tells the captivating story of a girl’s dream come true, but whether it’s a happy ending is a matter of opinion.

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.

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.

Wake Up Punk may constitute, in broadest terms, a debate about whether the legacy of punk has been commodified. But at its sensitive core (and despite much righteous anger and frustration) it is about how Joe Corré, son of punk visionaries Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, deals with his father’s memory and legacy as he plans to burn an estimated £5 million worth of punk memorabilia as an anarchist protest.