Wendy Mitchell

In After Work, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

At the heart of Damsgård & Klovborg’s film about the ISIS kidnapping of Danish photographer Daniel Rye is an incendiary interview, conducted by journalist Sean Langan, with two of the British kidnappers, infamously known as the Beatles. “As an interviewer, he makes just about every mistake in the handbook, but still he somehow succeeds in getting something to happen in that room that’s hard to explain,” says Klovborg.

In After Work, world-premiering in Copenhagen, Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini ponders how everyone’s work lives are changing in contemporary society. Humanity might need more “tolerance in society to let people decide for themselves what they want to do with their time. Some might create an important vaccine, some might go surfing. And this could shift in different times in our lives,” he muses with BDE.

It has been a whirlwind week for Sweden’s Mikel Cee Karlsson. On Sunday he was in Los Angeles at the Oscars as editor of Ruben Östlund’s triple-nominated Triangle of Sadness. Now he comes to CPH:DOX with his latest film as a director, A Tiger In Paradise in Dox:Award. The director speaks with Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 18 world-prem.

Lea Glob first met Apolonia Sokol in 2009 – when Glob was a film student in Copenhagen and Sokol was a bohemian art student in Paris. Sokol’s life journey has taken tumultuous twists and turns in those intervening 13 years – she is now an internationally award-winning painter – and Glob has been there to document every step of the way, she explains to BDE.

After chancing upon Winslow, Arizona – during a long drive he needed a place to sleep for the night – veteran Danish doccer Jon Bang Carlsen ended up falling in love with the place, and decided to set his latest doc there, about teenagers exploring the idea of freedom. “They all have some kind of scars,” the director says of his young cast. “Those scars can either bring them down or could make them wiser and more prepared to go on in life.”

In 2015, Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed was shooting a promo video for a physical rehabilitation centre when he met Estrid, who was then just 12 years old. She was doing rehab after falling out a fifth-floor window four months beforehand, which left her with 17 fractures but remarkably no brain injury. The director discusses Estrid’s subsequent six-year odyssey with BDE.

“I always dreamed about becoming an explorer,” Danish filmmaker Lars Ostenfeld tells Business Doc Europe ahead of the March 23 world premiere of CPH:DOX opener Into The Ice. “Every day we see something in the news about the ice melting, but we have no idea how fast it’s going,” says the director of what inspired his eco-doc. "Instead of just telling people something is wrong with the climate, I wanted to discover where do we get these numbers?”

Business Doc Europe talks to a very busy Steven Dhoedt, who is presenting two projects at RE>CONNEXT, The Sound of Seoul which examines the unique musical culture of post-War Korea, and Sunrise Kids, about the “historical tension between rebellion and conformity within post-war Japanese society.”

Director Louisiana Mees had previously explored coming-of-age in her fictional short Waithood, which was about Greek teenagers struggling to make their way in an economically depressed society; that marked her graduation project from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Now she tells a very different coming-of-age story in her feature doc debut And Tomorrow, The Whole World, she tells BDE.