CPH:DOX turns 20 this year and its artistic director Niklas Engstrøm promises the anniversary will be celebrated in some style.
“Even though the world is a mess, times are dark, still it is spring. It is our 20th anniversary and, of course, we should celebrate. We will celebrate as much as possible. This festival will be the most party-like festival ever,” Engstrøm declares. “And the big climax will be on Saturday the 18th when we will have a big birthday party at our festival centre.”
Engstrøm has been present from the very beginning (“the only surviving member”). He started working at the event when he was only 23. So what has changed since then – and what is the same?
“The belief that we can expand on what documentary is and what it can be, that is the red thread that has gone through the history of the festival,” Engstrøm says. “We want to present all the different formats and colours that documentary comes in.”
When CPH:DOX was launched, it was a “small grassroots structure…we didn’t have much money to run the festival. We almost didn’t have any support from any funding bodies. It was run on pure energy.”
Two decades on, that energy is still there but the event has turned into one of the world’s major documentary bazaars. CPH:DOX is not only bigger, but it is also now a key industry event.
The festival is launching with a screening of Lin Alluna’s Twice Colonized which exposes white Denmark’s often shameful treatment of the Greenlandic Inuit people.
“The film is very timely because it enters into a debate that is already running. A debate that has been running for many years in Denmark but hasn’t really made the headlines,” Engstrøm reflects. “But what has happened is that times have changed. When you raise these issues now, they enter into a different public sphere, meaning that people are really aware of representational issues, about the problems of colonialism. The perspective has changed.”
Engstrøm predicts that Twice Colonized will “have a huge impact in Denmark…the film definitely talks to all of us. It talks to the Greenlandic people, it talks to the Danish people and it says to all of us that we have to take responsibility for what has happened and how we are going to change it.”
The film also fits in neatly with the festival’s overriding theme this year: ‘predicting the past and rewriting the future.’
In the early 1990s, academic Francis Fukuyama famously suggested we had reached the “end of history.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, western-style liberal democracy appeared to have triumphed. 30 years later, Engstrøm believes, history has returned with a vengeance.
“It [history] is back as a weapon that you can use to change the public debate and actually make social change right now. It can be done by progressive movements. It can be done by conservative movements. But it really is something that is being used.”
Engstrøm cites Sarah Vos’s film White Balls On Walls as another documentary raising historical issues in a provocative new way. Vos asks why so much of the art work in museums is made by men. The film is about the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam “trying to bring art into a new age” but also to work out what to do about its own troublesome past.
There will be some big-name international guests in Copenhagen in the coming days. Legendary folk singer Joan Baez will be in town to accompany the screening of Joan Baez, I Am A Noise, the new film by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle. No, she won’t be belting out ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.’ Now in her early 80s, she no longer performs. However, she will take part in an evening of film and conversation.
“She is not only an amazing musician and singer but also a political activist and she is going to talk about both of these dimensions of her life,” says Engstrøm.
Another “big old hero” coming to town is German director Wim Wenders. He will give a talk while also presenting a new programme, A Sense Of Place, featuring six Iranian films that were made in partnership with The Wim Wenders Foundation. This includes docs by Mohammadreza Farzad (Hollow), Shirin Barghnavard (Density Of Emptiness), Mina Keshavarz (Phobos), Azin Faizabadi (Shadowless – In Transit), Pooya Abbasian (Mal Tourné) and Afsaneh Salari (Great Are The Eyes Of A Dead Father). Most of these directors should be in Copenhagen too.
The festival will be showing two of Wenders’ early docs, Silver City Revisited (1969) and Reverse Angle (1982).
The tireless Wenders is also executive producer of Margreth Olin’s new documentary, Songs Of Earth, a world premiere in Dox:Award.
Another high profile visitor to the festival is Nathan Fielder, the US comedian and star of HBO reality TV series, The Rehearsal.
Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s observational doc A Storm Foretold, about Roger Stone, former advisor to Donald Trump, is bound to provoke comment and controversy. It’s a Danish-made doc about very American subject matter.
“You get another perspective when you have a European making a film about Roger Stone than an American director…right now, the discourse in America is so divided that it might actually be difficult to make a film about a person like Roger Stone [there],” Engstrøm says of the shady political operator who is loathed by progressives in the States.
In 2022, CPH:DOX moved very quickly to programme Ukrainian films in response to the Russian invasion of the country just a few weeks before the festival began. This week, the support for Ukraine is continuing but with a different emphasis.
“Last year, we made a special programme. This year, we have several Ukrainian films in the programme but what we discussed and what we decided was that this year, what we really wanted was to support future Ukrainian films. Therefore our focus has very much been around the Forum where we have really been one the lookout for great Ukrainian projects so we could support them and make a platform where they can get support.”
How does Engstrøm feel about seeing major festivals like Venice and Berlin giving their main awards to documentary directors like Laura Poitras and Nicolas Philibert?
“I am just very happy,” the festival director says of how docs have hijacked Golden Lions and Golden Bears. “I’m just waiting for Cannes to enter the stage as well…seemingly whenever a documentary comes up against 18 or 20 fiction films, it ends up winning…”
