Back to selection
From Fables to Forensics: Five Documentaries from CPH:DOX 2026
Whispers in May CPH:DOX’s 2025 edition opened with Facing War, a documentary presenting the Russo-Ukrainian war through the final year of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s tenure. Though some critics found the film overly cautious in its presentation of political lobbying, its premiere proved unexpectedly well-timed amid Trump’s return to power and anxieties surrounding European alliances.
For CPH:DOX today, as one of the world’s leading documentary festivals, the familiar impulse to pair aesthetic ambition with political mediation feels ever more crucial as wars expand and multiply. Continuing the festival’s Ukraine-focused opening-film tradition, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka is exactly the kind of work that strikes a rare balance between artfulness and urgency.
For his 2016 film The Land of the Enlightened, De Pue spent years alongside orphaned child soldiers in Afghanistan, casting them in a celluloid dreamlike fable that countered the country’s long visual reduction to scenes of devastation. The imagery of Donbas, situated along the Russia-Ukraine border, is burdened by a similar fate in Mariinka. Filming for over a decade in and around the titular small city bordering the frontline before Russia’s fullblown occupation in 2024, De Pue again follows orphaned children whose youth was swallowed by war. Among them are brothers turned enemies on opposite sides of the battlefield and the young paramedic Natascha, whose voice lends the film its lyrical narration. Composed from footage gathered in trenches, (inter)national borders, and in the reflective intervals in between, Mariinka offers a poetic portrait of a wounded Donbas.
If contemporary war documentaries are largely defined by the rough digital imagery of austere immediacy, De Pue, armed with a 16mm camera, sacrifices mobility in favor of a more exalted visual register. Celluloid’s warmth lends dignity to the protagonists’ close-ups and the star-filled skies, while its texture provides a visceral force to images of an artery pulsing blood after being shot from centimeters away, or the view atop a tank in active combat. Mariinka exposes something essential about the bipolar yet powerful nature of war “cinema.” Its ability to be at once visually immaculate and emotionally tender while relentlessly graphic finds an equally artful expression of the surreal reality of war.
Character-driven, sensitive documentaries were notably prominent in this year’s selection, particularly those centered on young women navigating political pressure and social crisis. Among the most charming—and the recipient of the competition’s top award—is Whispers in May by Chinese director Dongnan Chen. Her film unfolds as a coming-of-age road-trip fable anchored in documentary observation. Its heroine, fourteen-year-old Qihuo, is a lonely child who skips school and is loosely parented over the phone by a mother working far away as a migrant laborer, who alternates between pushing her toward factory work and weighing the transactional benefits of marriage. When Qihuo reveals to two friends the secret of her first menstruation, the trio sets out to a city through the Liangshan Mountains in search of the traditional skirt that marks this rite of passage.
Chen describes her method as “improvised fiction,” which gives her a supple way of honoring both the girls’ fearless spontaneity and the picturesque landscape’s folk imprint. Throughout, the film intercuts still illustrations accompanied by voiceover narrating the oral myth of Coqotamat, comic and threatening, and at times resonant with the girls’ own prolonged voyage. The camerawork is striking in its persistence—following the heroines into suspicious houses at night or through the rain in search of shelter—while knowing to grant them distance as they speak quietly about their futures. Through such moments of attentiveness, Whispers in May arrives at a lyrical celebration of innocence, set against breathtaking mountains ready to swallow it whole.
By contrast, Kenya-Jade Pinto’s debut is devoted to those denied visibility and the recognition of their lives as valuable. The Sandbox unfolds as a sweeping exposure of the global surveillance machine, under which migrants of every kind are among the first to fall. Drones, robots, CCTV, and AI are now deployed on an unprecedented scale to control migration at the borders of privileged states, turning zones of patrol into profitable trial grounds. Pinto takes an almost ruthlessly global view, with the film moving across continents—from North America to Europe and Africa—to trace both those who fine-tune these invasive technologies and the migrants whose lives are reduced to test cases.
Formally, The Sandbox adopts the same bleak divide it diagnoses, moving between the inhuman gaze of thermal imaging and drones and the ground-level intimacy of survivor testimony and volunteers searching for human remains. Yet in crossing so many geographies and migratory flashpoints, often only skimming their deeper contexts, it sometimes loses hold of the humanist impulse it seeks to restore. But what the film loses in depth it recovers in scope, rendering a borderless observation with harrowing unease. As governments perfect their borders, humanity seems only to forfeit its own.
Multimedia artist and researcher Manuel Correa manages to foreground the humane within the inhumane. In Atlas of Disappearance, he confronts the traces of Franco’s dictatorship by excavating its buried truths through cutting-edge technology.
Eight years in the making, the film centres on three relatives of disappeared citizens as they move through an exhausting bureaucratic maze. Correa counters that gubernatorial obstruction with digital maps of sealed mausoleums and 3D reconstructions that exhume human remains—offering these families an avenue for mourning and justice.
Correa is a member of Forensic Architecture, a research agency that brings together specialists, including filmmakers and coders, to make evidence public across multimedia formats, especially where physical evidence is absent or suppressed. In doing so, it expands what can count as legal proof while allowing evidence to move beyond the courtroom and into cultural institutions. Bones, the central subject of Correa’s film, carry a particular symbolic weight within forensic aesthetics, a substance from which truth cannot be fully erased. Where legal actors make evidence speak before the court, Correa assumes a comparable role as director, with the festival serving as his forum. Weaving together situated testimonies, archival fragments, and state-of-the-art computer technologies beneath a somnambulistic voiceover, Atlas of Disappearance becomes a striking example of how rigorously forensic documentaries can balance law and art.
Against the backdrop of so many sharply political films, even the selection’s more comforting subjects seemed to adopt a concordant tone. Take Karl Friis Forchhammer’s Christiania, a smart ode to the eponymous Danish freetown, founded in 1971 by young anarchist-idealists who squatted in former military barracks and set out to build an alternative paradise. Forchhammer treats Christiania less as an ideal than as a lived contradiction. While he does celebrate the romantic force of its radical democratic vision, he is ultimately more interested in exposing the inconvenient cracks in that history—drugs, violence, political pressure, and a tourism boom.
Despite the wealth of exciting, rarely seen archival footage, the film avoided the danger of lapsing into a didactically nostalgic slideshow. Forchhammer calibrates the viewer’s expectations, regaling us with vivid passages of local legend and essential lore, including figures as improbable and memorable as the alcoholic black bear Rikke. Christiania also surprises with occasional animated sequences that tip into overgrown fantasy, giving its stories and figures a form they could not otherwise assume on camera. By unsettling the freetown’s crystalline utopian image, the film offers a serious reflection on consensual democracy, questioning the limits of total tolerance and people’s recurring problem with open dialogue. So even if Christiania can no longer uphold its utopian promise, the film may be read, in the context of this year’s selection, as a warning of increasingly dystopian times.
