Festival:
The 19th CPH:DOX
Dates:
March 23-April 3
About:
More than 160 new and recent features are included in this first-class Danish nonfiction event.
Among the offerings:
DOX:Award
GIRL GANG
Director: Susanne Regina Meures
A contemporary fairy tale about a 14-year-old influencer from Berlin and her biggest fan.
HIDE AND SEEK
Director: Victoria Fiore
Four furious years in one of Naples’ toughest neighborhoods, where all three generations of a single family live on the edge of the law.
HOLIDAYS
Director: Antoine Cattin
Russia’s record-high number of holidays are celebrated at an upbeat pace and with black humor in a lively mosaic of impressions from life in the vast, inscrutable country in the East.
INTO THE ICE
Director: Lars Ostenfeld
A grand, cinematic adventure on the Greenland ice sheet with three leading scientists in search of what the ice can tell us about our climate, our past and possible future.
OUTSIDE
Director: Olha Zhurba
As a 13-year-old boy, he became the poster boy of the Ukrainian revolution, but now Roma is back on the streets with nothing in his pocket but a lighter and a knife.
THEY MADE US THE NIGHT
Director: Antonio Hernández
Supernatural visions and indigenous folk myths intrude in an unpredictable and dreamlike film about a family living in the shadow of the apocalypse.
UNDER THE SKY SHELTER
Director: Diego Acosta
A lone shepherd crosses rivers, forests, and cliffs with thousands of sheep, losing himself in the mountains while dreams appear like ghosts.
F:ACT Award
BLACK MAMBAS
Director: Lena Karbe
The South African women of the Black Mambas fight against poachers and for women’s liberation and empowerment.
A FRENCH REVOLUTION
Director: Emmanuel Gras
A modern protest movement seen from the inside, observing the methods, aims, and inner contradictions of the French Yellow Vests.
THE DEAL
Director: Chiara Sambuchi
Investigative crime-documentary about how the arms of the Nigerian mafia reach far into Europe and use religious pressure to keep trafficked women in prostitution.
RULES OF WAR
Director: Guido Hendrikx
Simple setup, complex film: a Red Cross delegate and a group of hardcore South Sudanese soldiers clash in their views of war and conflict.
THIS STOLEN COUNTRY OF MINE
Director: Marc Wiese
Chinese mining in Ecuador’s mountains sets the stage for an epic battle between eco-guerrillas and a corrupt government.
Nordic:Dox
ALL THAT REMAINS TO BE SEEN
Director: Julie Bezerra Madsen
A blind mother and her seven-year-old son teach each other how to navigate the world as his vision slowly fades and a new life awaits.
DAUGHTERS
Director: Jenifer Malmqvist
A sensitive and poignant film about three young girls’ grieving process after their mother’s suicide, told over a period of 10 years.
THE HAPPY WORKER
Director: John Webster
With black humor and biting irony, the incredible story of how modern working life became its own worst enemy – and what we can do to change it.
JUST ANIMALS
Director: Saila Kivelä, Vesa Kuosmanen
Adrenaline-fueled activist animal welfare film told in the first person, about becoming politically aware – and about how your own idealism can turn against you when the world won’t listen.
KARAOKE PARADISE
Director: Einari Paakkanen
A heartwarming feel-good film about how karaoke culture has taken hold where least expected: the notoriously introverted Finland.
THE LAST HUMAN
Director: Ivalo Frank
Researcher Minik Rosing’s landmark discovery of the first life contrasts with the melting ice masses in this tribute to Greenland, where life on Earth begins and ends.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Director: Emilie Beck
A young woman confronts her own story as an adopted child from Sri Lanka, expanding her existential quest into a detective hunt for the truth in a morass of forged documents, corruption, and family trauma.
New:Vision
PARKLAND OF DECAY AND FANTASY
Director: Chenliang Zhu
Technology and spirituality are parallel forces in an abandoned and possibly haunted Chinese amusement park taken over by outsider artists.
STINKING DAWN
Director: Gelitin, Liam Gillick
A Viennese exhibition space becomes the site of a collective project, where the boundaries between body and world dissolve in a delirious and darkly funny mirror image of civilization itself.
Next:Wave
KASH KASH: WITHOUT FEATHERS WE CAN’T LIVE
Director: Lea Najjar
A vital, cinematic snapshot of Lebanon and its chaotic state, where the flat rooftops high above the city streets become a hopeful haven for people practicing the ritualistic pigeon sport Kash Hamam.
NO PLACE FOR YOU IN OUR TOWN
Director: Nikolay Stefanov
The hard life of a hardcore football hooligan in a Bulgarian mining town where operations have long since shut down and the future looks bleak.
THE PAWNSHOP
Director: Łukasz Kowalski
Black docu-comedy from the largest pawn shop in Poland, where times are tough, bankruptcy looms, but then the two choleric proprietors get a bright idea.
SAMI’S ODYSSEYS
Director: Robin Dimet
In Ethiopia’s labyrinthine capital, a recluse sits translating Greek and Roman myths on an ancient laptop as cosmic chaos presses in on him.
SPORTCAST 2
Director: Sara Sjölin
Set to images of an old football match between Malmö and Helsingborg, the tragicomic story of a failed and destructive relationship with an ex-boyfriend.
Danish:Dox
AFTER LIFE
Director: Theis Mølstrøm Christensen
Mette’s near-death experience was so overwhelming for her that she is trying to reconstruct it in virtual reality in order to share her experience with the world.
THE CAPTAIN’S HEART
Director: Simon Bang
Beautiful hand-drawn animations tell the adventurous story of the filmmaker’s grandfather, an old-school ship captain and seafarer who spent 50 dramatic years at sea before facing up to family life.
MAKING LIFE COUNT
Director: Ulrik Einer Ehrhorn Gutt-Nielsen
A Danish baron travels to Rome to convince the Pope to defend the world’s animals before it is too late for himself to continue the fight.
NAKSKOV 1:50
Director: Matilda Mester
An affectionate, locally rooted portrait of the Danish town of Nakskov as a miniature model in the ratio of 1:50.
NOBODY KNOWS CASPER
Director: Rene Odgaard
A young man from Odense becomes a YouTube star, but where does the (self-)ironic staging end, and who is the real Casper when the webcam is off?
TALIBAN LAND
Director: Nagieb Khaja, Peter Eggert Vesterlund
A journalist travels around Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover to paint a portrait of the regime and its transition of power.
Special Premieres
FASHION BABYLON
Director: Gianluca Matarrese
The fashion world as seen by three insiders who share their ups and desperate downs with brutal honesty and liberating (self-)irony.
NOVOROSSIYA
Director: Enrico Parenti, Luca Gennari
The Ukrainian eastern fronts of Donetsk and Luhansk where the Russian army and pro-Russian separatists had been waging a war against Ukraine even before Putin’s full-scale invasion this year.
WIRECARD: THE BILLION EURO LIE
Director: Jono Bergmann, Benjamin Bergmann
Germany’s biggest financial scandal in a hard-hitting docu-thriller about big egos, billions of Euros, and shattered illusions.
Highlights
AFTER A REVOLUTION
Director: Giovanni Buccomino
A brother and sister, on opposite sides after the revolution in Libya, must find each other again and rebuild the country.
INTO MY NAME
Director: Nicolò Bassetti
Four young Italian friends’ individual gender transitions, told with an overwhelming, natural sensibility.
RESTITUTION? AFRICA’S FIGHT FOR ITS ART
Director: Nora Philippe
Should Western museums return works of art and cultural artifacts to Africa?
THE SCARS OF ALI BOULALA
Director: Max Eriksson
The rush of total freedom came with a price for Swedish skateboard star Ali Boulala in the 1990s, when he unleashed his inner wildness in a frenzy of drugs, alcohol, and chaos.
THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO
Director: Bruce Weber
A stylish and elegant film about the beauty and grandeur of post-war Italy, and about the photographer who portrayed it.
Sound & Vision
THE COMPUTER ACCENT
Director: Riel Roch-Decter, Sebastian Pardo
American post-pop group YACHT embarks on a radical creative experiment: inviting a computer into the recording studio.
REWIND & PLAY
Director: Alain Gomis
Thelonius Monk is on the loose on French TV in 1969, where the jazz giant takes down an arrogant journalist with cosmic attitude.
THE SUBHARCHORD: A FUTURE THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Director: Ina Pillat
A charming trip on the trail of a sound generator from the GDR, of which only three exist in the world today – Cold War technology and retro-futuristic sounds from a future that could have been.
Artists & Auteurs
THE AFTERLIGHT
Director: Charlie Shackleton
Where does a movie character go when the film ends? Scenes from hundreds of feature films are spliced together in a single extant 35mm film print, destined to demonstrate its own transience.
BEATRIX
Director: Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky
It is summer, the days are long, and a young woman is home alone in an old villa in an enigmatic and atmospheric film from the twilight between documentary and fiction.
EL GRAN MOVIMIENTO
Director: Kiro Russo
A supernatural hybrid of dream and reality, in which a miner in an oxygen-starved metropolis is haunted by nightmares and a shamanistic ritual is the only way out.
I’M SO SORRY
Director: Liang Zhao
Abandoned, radioactive landscapes, and the ruins of power plants are possessed by a haunting power in this visually stunning and suggestive work.
PERFECT BOYFRIEND
Director: Kaori Kinoshita, Alain Della Negra
Technology and psychology merge in an ethnographic fiction-hybrid from modern Japan, where three adult men have fallen in love with a fictional character from a computer game.
CPH:Science
AI AT WAR
Director: Florent Marcie
A philosophical and paradoxical human adventure, with a robot as travel companion, exploring what AI can tell us about the darkest side of humanity.
CARBON: AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY
Director: Daniella Ortega, Niobe Thompson
With creative spirit and philosophical depth, the life story of carbon – born of the stars, present within ourselves, and with the power to create and destroy.
HOW TO SURVIVE A PANDEMIC
Director: David France
The incredible story of the world’s biggest health science project: the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.
THE INVISIBLE EXTINCTION
Director: Steven Lawrence, Sarah Schenck
The extinction of healthy bacteria in our bodies could escalate a new global health crisis, but the field’s top two scientists are on the case, examining the impact microbiomes have on our wellbeing.
PLEISTOCENE PARK
Director: Luke Griswold-Tergis
A bumpy journey to the Siberian steppes, where a Russian geophysicist wants to restore the ecosystems of the Ice Age through radical rewilding.
UNSEEN SKIES
Director: Yaara Bou Melhem
American artist Trevor Paglen, who uses the most advanced technology to map surveillance, data flows, and the state’s monitoring of our lives, is about to launch the most ambitious project of his career.
Change Makers
BLUE/RED/DEPORT
Director: Lina Lužytė
With a zest for life, an Afghan refugee throws himself into making a feature film in the Moria camp where he lives.
NAME OF THE GAME
Director: Håvard Bustnes
In Norway, the former leader of the Labour Party is attempting a political comeback after a #metoo case, but times have already changed.
ROBIN BANK
Director: Anna Giralt Gris
Detective film about the hunt for the Spanish Robin Hood who stole half a million Euros from the banks and gave the money away before going underground.
SPANTON VS THE FRENCH POLICE
Director: Ovidie Ovidie
When two French police officers are accused of assaulting a Canadian woman, the system sides with the men, but then the first #metoo wave rolls and the case takes a major twist.
what (not) to doc 