The Land of the Enlightened
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From Fables to Forensics: Five Documentaries from CPH:DOX 2026
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 […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Mar 23, 2026 -
“We Got Attacked by the Taliban”: Pieter-Jan De Pue on Sundance Doc The Land of the Enlightened
Belgian filmmaker and photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue makes his feature film and Sundance debut with The Land of the Enlightened. Shot over five years in Afghanistan, the documentary tracks a group of Kuchi children who unearth old Soviet land mines and sell them to child workers at a nearby mine. De Pue shot, edited and directed the film. Below, he shares stories of a dramatic, at times violent production that placed him and his crew in the Taliban’s crosshairs. The Land of the Enlightened had its world premiere at Sundance 2016 in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Filmmaker: How and why […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 28, 2016 -
Sundance Dispatch 3: Kate Plays Christine, Christine 7 The Land of the Enlightened
Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible biopic (a fiction Greene uses to instigate the entire film; […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2016
