CPH:DOX 24

Yance Ford’s new feature doc Power (which screened at CPH:DOX and is soon to launch on Netflix) looks at the origins of police power in the US and asks why American citizens have allowed cops to hold so much sway over their lives. The film features interviews with many leading academics who detail with chilling clarity the reasons behind 200 years of American police bias and brutality. This, as Ford puts it to Business Doc Europe, is a system with “violence, coercion and control’ at its core.

Greek director Elina Psykou, whose Stray Bodies plays in CPH:DOX F:ACT AWARD, spoke to BDE about the recent protests in Thessaloniki over the film’s poster that depicts a semi-naked and pregnant Madonna nailed to the Cross. Psykou, who received online hate mail over past weeks, says she is apprehensive about the film’s wider opening in Greece on March 28, but will not be deterred from using the same poster. “I don't want to let fear conquer,” she says. “But I have to admit that after all these days, I'm very exhausted.”

The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY awards 2024 were announced March 21 in Copenhagen. Four awards were handed out to CPH:FORUM projects looking for gap-financing as well as CPH:LAB projects with their focus on immersive non-fiction. Three CPH:LAB project awards were handed out at the Prototype Event in Odd Fellow Palace on March 18. All winners…

Traversing the majestic Andean Highlands, the Atacama Desert and the Coastal Cliffs, the documentary Unwelcomed unveils the harsh reality of the migration crisis in Latin America and northern Chile’s radicalisation. The pic, set to premiere in 2025 and directed by Sebastian Gonzalez Mendez and Amilcar Infante, was one of the WIP projects presented at CPH:DOX 2024.

Norwegian docmaker Benjamin Ree talks to BDE about his double-Sundance winning Ibelin, which screens at CPH ahead of its launch on Netflix. The film, about a young man and his secret gaming life that is only discovered after his untimely death, has been wowing both young and older audiences alike back in Norway. “A lot of them [the older generation] go to the cinema because they want to understand their children or their grandchildren,” says Ree.

Inspired by the wild popularity of American WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) in India, two brothers create their own wrestling league. Assembling a band of aspiring wrestlers, they put at stake money, social acceptance and love, in pursuit of a daring dream. This is the premise of The Dirty Dream, pitched at CPH:DOX 2024 and helmed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh who were Oscar-nominated filmmakers for their 2021 doc Writing with Fire.

At CPH:DOX 2024, BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated director Ursula Macfarlane (The Lost Sons, Untouchable, Charlie Hebdo: 3 Days That Shook Paris) and award-winning producer Mandy Chang pitched their new feature, whose working title is The Second Woman. One of the buzziest projects presented at this year’s edition, it promises to be a radical, provocative documentary built around a legendary 24-hour play starring actor Ruth Wilson.

The prolific and versatile Alina Simone has been working as a journalist and radio reporter for many years. She is also an essayist, author and singer-songwriter - and now she has turned feature filmmaker too. Her documentary Black Snow, about a Siberian mother-of-three who finds herself under the aggressive scrutiny of the Russian authorities when she steps up as a citizen journalist, world-premiered this week at CPH:DOX. Simone talks to BDE.

50 years on from that momentous night in April 1974 in Brighton, England, when the unsung Swedes won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo, British filmmaker James Rogan is telling the story of one of the greatest pop bands in history with a depth and insight that transcends cheap nostalgia. “I love to make films about outsiders and I think that ABBA were the ultimate pop outsiders,” he tells BDE of his new feature doc, ABBA - Against the Odds.

At CPH:DOX 2024, Business Doc Europe attended the WIP presentation of John Webster’s new doc Burnt Heart. In it, a group of Finnish firefighters form a specialist brigade to prepare for the large wildfires of the future. They travel to Portugal to learn from their elite colleagues already fighting on the frontlines of our climate emergency. He defined Burnt Earth as “a character-driven story about very relatable, ordinary people doing something extraordinary.”