CPH:DOX
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Truth to Power: Why CPH:DOX is The Future of Progressive Fests
With the “golden age” of documentary filmmaking still upon us, there’s no shortage of doc fests to attend throughout the year (especially around November, when it often feels like a nonfiction pileup). The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, however, knows how to set itself apart from the pack. Besides now taking place in March (and thus not needing to fight with IDFA over eyeballs and premieres), CPH:DOX strives to be “the best festival in and for the world.” What this means in concrete terms is that, though CPH:DOX showcases everything from cinematic art pieces to true-crime thrillers, it’s forever rooted […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 19, 2019 -
“This Kind of Storytelling with Real People is Social Experimentation”: Marcus Lindeen on his CPH:DOX-Winning Conceptual Doc, The Raft
Reposted here from its original publication following last year’s CPH:DOX — where the film won the top prize — is Pamela Cohn’s intensive interview with director Marcus Lindeen about his provocative non-fiction experiment, The Raft. The documentary opens tomorrow for a run at New York’s Metrograph, with Lindeen and various commentators and critics appearing at the various screenings. Swedish artist, writer and director Marcus Lindeen stepped into documentary filmmaking with a very specific method in mind as to how he wanted to frame people’s stories. His particular obsession within the context of nonfiction is in the performative aspects of insinuating […]
by Pamela Cohn on Jun 6, 2018 -
Don’t Fence Me In: Pitching Boundary-Crossing Docs at CPH:FORUM 2018
Of all the various fundraising tools and opportunities at filmmakers’ disposal these days (the majority of them still in the DIY vein), pitch forums present a constant challenge: are they still relevant? With formats increasingly resembling chat or even game shows, today’s pitch forums are becoming performance-driven, the implicit agreement being that decision makers will actively support at least some of the projects presented with funding, distribution and sales opportunities. As someone who works in a freelance capacity helping to choose projects for various pitch forums (although not CPH:FORUM), I see first-hand how the few projects that make the stage […]
by Pamela Cohn on Apr 4, 2018 -
“We Have Only Scratched the Surface of What is Possible in Erotic VR Media”: Jennifer Lyon Bell on Her Fantasy Film Workshop and Creating Erotic VR
The last time I interviewed veteran filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell for this site topics ranged from “fair trade” porn to the inaugural Holy Fuck Film Festival in Amsterdam (where the expat feminist pornographer has long resided). And now Bell, recipient of both the Feminist Porn Awards 2014 Movie of the Year (for Silver Shoes, which premiered at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) and a psych degree from Harvard, continues to expand her mission of providing sex education for those behind the lens, while also exploring the new media horizon through her own artistic work. I caught up with Bell to […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 21, 2018 -
Festival Beat: Doclisboa and CPH:DOX
Doclisboa by Pamela Cohn “I can’t trust my own memories, and neither should the audience.” — filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen, The Young Man Was trilogy A robust and wide-ranging sidebar program at a festival draws on the conventions of the multivolume novel, or the cantos of a long poem, varied portraits refracting off a narrative throughline. Stories both epic and quotidian dovetail and, as a result, iconoclastic interventions and disruptions atomise historical temporality. What’s left behind when the so-called terrorist no longer identifies, or is identified, as such? Or is dead? Or never existed in the first place? Traces of a progression […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2016 -
The Plane and the Film: On Fears of Flying and Filmmaking
I believe there is a correlation between flying and filmmaking. Walter Murch makes reference to it in the documentary The Cutting Edge, but his coloration is different. He says that flight and cinema were invented in the same year, and then later he states that editing gave flight to cinema. While I agree with these correlations I think there is more, and it didn’t totally hit me until recently, as I shared with my students a documentary on Sally Mann and then a few days later boarded a plane to Copenhagen to attend CHP:DOX. In the documentary, Mann discusses a […]
by Robert Machoian on Nov 8, 2015 -
CPH:DOX 2013
“Mission accomplished.” That might have been the motto of the 2013 edition of CPH:DOX. If, at one point, this doc festival’s liberal definition of “reality” roiled nonfiction traditionalists (it was the fest, after all, that gave its 2009 top award to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers), those days are long since gone. As BBC Storyville’s commissioning editor Nick Fraser commented at a panel on hybrid journalism, there’s almost an expectation by contemporary audiences that documentaries today — not just at CPH:DOX but everywhere — will play with concepts of truth and fiction. “Is there anything left of the tradition of objective […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2014 -
Children of the Revolution: Director Narimane Mari on her Award-Winning Bloody Beans
The focus this year’s edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (commonly known as CPH:DOX) was squarely on the political, with programs exploring the intersection of art and activism. Guest curators Ai Weiwei and The Yes Men programmed eclectic sidebars under the festival’s theme “Everything is Under Control.” A section devoted to Chinese documentaries emphasized the medium’s vital role in surveying the state, and the festival added a new award explicitly addressing the recent crop of documentaries that operate between investigative journalism and activism. Taking the festival’s top prize was Bloody Beans, the first feature by French-Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari, […]
by Paul Dallas on Dec 6, 2013 -
City World Director Brent Chesanek
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2013 -
Music Video: David Bowie’s The Stars Are Out Tonight, Directed by Floria Sigismondi
David Bowie and Tilda Swinton star as a retiring couple assaulted — literally — by vampiric celebrity culture in the latest from David Bowie. It’s directed by Floria Sigismondi, who is in fine form with this electrifyingly creepy clip. With the new Bowie album due out in a few weeks, you may have seen its wildposting campaign, in which its title, “The Next Day” is superimposed over a variety of advertising images. On its blog, CPH:DOX, which has paid homage to Bowie by naming an entire section after one of his songs (“Sound and Vision”), notes their own use of the same […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2013
