CPH:DOX is the premier documentary film festival in the world. The biggest names in non-fiction gather in Copenhagen for ten days in March to showcase their latest work, with a significant pitching forum and buyers market to boot. It’s also home to the NEXT:WAVE competition, focussing on emerging filmmakers. It’s where the great discoveries in the (ahem) next wave of documentary cinema can be found.
Chris Cassingham reports on two female-directed films tackling failure on the road to self-actualisation; discussing how working on the periphery gives one unique insight into the way cinema actually works. Read on now.
My First Film Testifies to the Collective Energy Necessary for All Creation
It feels impossible to distil Zia Anger’s My First Film (2024) to some kind of essence in a short review.
Her latest is a deeply personal docufiction about the fraught production of her first, technically abandoned, feature film, adapted (but also not really adapted) from her renowned 2018 feature-length live video essay/performance piece of the same name — also about the failed films of Anger’s early career.
Taking the simultaneous forms of dramatic narrative, archival documentary, and desktop multimedia, My First Film is, in theme and form, a creation of collaboration.
Anger raises key questions about birth and filmmaking that, despite verging on cliché, form its deeply resonant core. It’s a film haunted by the past, yet somehow also haunted by the future and the promise of what’s to come. Even if the “what” is a total mystery.
Read on at Journey Into Cinema.
To Be An Extra Examines a Self In Parts
Henrike Meyer describes To Be An Extra (2024) as speaking from the future.
Like Zia Anger’s My First Film, Meyer’s film uses the medium of cinema and the act of filmmaking as tools for self-actualisation. Where Anger’s is a fraught, euphoric, collective effort, Meyer’s is internalised, verging on solipsism. Both, however, reveal cinema’s vital role in our lives to merge the past, present and future into one embodied experience.
Meyer’s work as a background actor taught her to be nothing; to be seen but not seen, to be essential but also extraneous. A self in parts, she calls herself. The film’s most interesting segments are the detailed, textured and fragmented examinations of her screen “roles”. The context she gives to the various detectives, cops, nurses, prisoners and partygoers she’s portrayed necessarily involves decontextualising the larger projects to which they contribute, ultimately giving her work a human reality that both requires it and minimises it.
Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!